CAVLP facilitates projects in the Clyde and Avon Valleys to help conserve the built and natural heritage of the area; to increase community participation and landscape connection; to improve access to and learning about the landscape and heritage of the Clyde and Avon Valleys; and to provide new training opportunities in local heritage (http://www.clydeandavonvalley.org/about-us). As part of their strategy, CAVLP wanted to train its member organisations’ volunteers to collect oral histories on various topics connected to the area’s history and cultural life, and have the resulting recordings be added to an online archive – a ‘virtual museum’.

Local Voices helped CAVLP to develop a model and strategy that would allow it to manage a distributed oral history project, acting as a central co-ordinator while devolving the collection management to each of its partners. We also designed a technical specification for the project, and helped source equipment and software for making and post-processing the oral history interviews. We then trained the volunteers to go out into the field and begin collecting, and equipped them with a ‘Getting Started Kit’ – a field manual covering the process from start to finish.