Spring Newsletter 2017
Spring News from Know Your Place
As we leap forward into Spring, we are pleased to update you on the latest Spring News and our plans in the Know Your Place project for the coming months.
Project Springs Forward as Map work nears end
With less than 100 maps left to crop, we’re well on our way to completing what has been an epic task to crop and georeferenced digitised historic map files. Our thanks go to volunteers who have now given an impressive 607 days’ work to the project so far and who are continuing to work hard to complete this task.
We are running a series of Thank You events for volunteers in early April to mark this achievement, and to explore other volunteering opportunities still available in the project. Volunteers can find details in your latest volunteer newsletter here.
As we prepare to move on from this work, our team member Anne Lovejoy also gets ready to move on to pastures new, too, and we wish her every success in her new role.
Breaking Spring News: Putting Somerset and North Somerset on the Map this month!
After a long wait, development work is now back in full swing and our team are working hard to complete the remaining pieces of work on Know Your Place.
The first priority is to map Somerset and North Somerset onto Know Your Place. Websites for each of these counties are due to appear over the coming month of April 2017. We will also be surveying users of KYP Wiltshire and Bath & NE Somerset during April, so please take our pop-up survey if you see it.
Our team will then turn their attention to remaining work, including: mapping Historic Environment Data onto KYP Gloucestershire; and the addition of a whole raft of additional historic basemap layers added to Know Your Place across the region. By the end of June 2017 we will have mapped more than 200 year’s worth of historic maps covering seven counties, and it will be over to you to help us enrich the map by putting local knowledge of heritage near you onto the map…
Just two counties remain to be mapped on Know Your Place, seen here in grey
Spring Events near you
Three roadshows down, three more to go!
In February we went to Bradley Stoke Library, and over the past two weekends we were at opposite ends of the region in Salisbury Cathedral and Dean Heritage Centre, helping visitors map their local heritage onto Know Your Place.
Over the next month we’ll be bringing our pop-up event to Radstock Museum, The Bishop’s Palace and Chippenham Museum. We hope you’ll join us there to show visitors how to explore your neighbourhood’s heritage on Know Your Place! Read more about the roadshows planned here.
Visitors to Dean Heritage Centre share their thoughts about Know Your Place
Mapping your Collections with Confidence
At our two workshops so far, we have trained 32 individuals from 27 different organisations in how to prepare and map their collections onto Know Your Place. Project partners at Gloucestershire Archives and Chippenham Museum shared their experiences of mapping collections onto Know Your Place. You can read Gloucestershire Archives’ experiences here.
Workshop attendees were impressed by the comprehensiveness of the project and Know Your Place coverage in the areas mapped. After training, they told us:“It seems to be user friendly!” and “It’s a great resource and easy to use – so put something up.”
Future workshops will run during May, across Bristol, Bath, North Somerset, South Gloucestershire and Somerset. So if you are interested in mapping your collections onto Know Your Place, then this is for you. Look out for further details appearing shortly.
Back to School
We have been pulling together some great materials to go into our schools Learning Pack, which will focus on using Know Your Place to support local history projects.
In April we’ll be heading back to school to test out our draft materials in the classroom with partnering schools. The final Learning Pack will be available in late May for free download from our project website. We can’t wait to see how schools across the region begin using it in the classroom over the coming academic year.
If you are a teacher interested to take part in testing, contact us to find out more, and look out for further information in our next blog due out next week.
Adam shows volunteer Anne where his school is on the map, at our Dean Heritage Centre roadshow last weekend
Last chance to see Exhibition
Our touring exhibition was installed into the final four of our twelve touring venues in early March and you have just a few weeks left to visit it at The Bishops’ Palace, Wells; Radstock Museum; Salisbury Cathedral and the Yelde Hall, Chippenham.
We are working with partners to identify venues to host a future ‘KYP-lite’ version of the exhibition at the moment, with the hope that it will continue touring in some areas. The exhibition will continue to be available online at www.kypexplore.com .
In an elegant setting: KYPexplore touring exhibition at The Bishop’s Palace now
Join the party!
As we approach the final three months of the project, we are looking ahead to celebrating our achievements – and we’d like you to join us! Please pencil Wednesday 21st June into your diary and join us in Yate Central Library to mark the conclusion of the project. We will be inviting project partners, supporters and interested members of the public to an afternoon event to review what we’ve achieved, celebrate our achievements and share ideas for future projects using Know Your Place. We hope you can join us there.