Museum needs photo finish (From The Wiltshire Gazette and Herald)

Museum needs photo finish

8:00am Saturday 11th March 2006 in Wiltshire By Jill Crooks

Volunteers are needed to finish cataloguing records and photographs on to the website of Wiltshire Heritage Museum.

The museum's online catalogue contains 42,000 records and 1,500 photos and money has been provided by the Government's Designation Challenge Fund for Museum's with outstanding collections.

Museum staff and volunteers have worked on the project for the past two years but the task has proved to be greater than anticipated.

When the project started the museum's curatorial staff expected to document all the objects in the collection with about 50,000 computer records.

However, although the majority of the recent history, art, photographs and coin collections have been listed the database only covers about half of the archaeology and the natural history collections.

But as a result of a grant from The Pilgrim Trust the computerised cataloguing work will continue for at least another two years and the museum is looking for volunteers, particularly those with an archaeology or natural history background, to do this. Those interested should contact Heather Ault on (01380) 727369.

Visitors to the museum's website www.wiltshireheritage.org.uk - can search the archaeology collections and see pictures of some of the more interesting items as well as viewing the museum's renowned collection of early 19th century paintings of Wiltshire churches and houses by John Buckler.

Museum curator Paul Robinson said: "The large amount of information now available on our website will be a great help to researchers and anyone interested in the museum's holdings of objects relating to Wiltshire's history.

"We are extremely grateful to The Pilgrim Trust for supporting the continuation of this project, which will ensure we can continue to upload data and images to the website over the coming months.

"We would also like to thank our band of willing volunteers, without whom this work would not have progressed so well."