Your feedback helps us to improve our website.

Translate

Walsall Archive for All blog June 2026: Celebrating our WAFA volunteers!

Volunteer update – June 2026

As part of #VolunteersWeek, we’re delighted to take this opportunity to celebrate the incredible contribution of our volunteers on the Walsall Archive for All (WAFA) Project - and to say a huge thank you to each and every one of them.

Volunteers' Week logo and thank you cards

We welcomed our first WAFA volunteer back in August 2025, supporting our metadata task. This involves creating descriptions of images so they can be uploaded to our online archive. 

The system we use is called Preservica - a digital preservation platform used by organisations around the world to protect and provide long-term access to valuable digital collections. Thanks to our funders the National Lottery Heritage Fund, with thanks to National Lottery players, we’ve been able to invest in this powerful tool. We’ll be sharing more about how it works in a future blog post.

Digitising the Jack Haddock Collection

Thanks to our growing team of volunteers, learning new skills, they’ve made a great progress scanning Jack Haddock’s wonderful images. There are over 9,000 images and they are 700 images in! It’s a huge task, but thanks to our volunteers, we’re making a strong and steady start.

Each photograph - whether black and white or colour - is carefully handled using nitrile gloves to ensure it is preserved. Images are scanned, lightly edited, and saved in both JPEG and TIFF formats to maintain quality and accessibility.

You can explore the archive here:
👉 WAFA Online Archive

WAFA volunteer work so far…

  • We’re excited to be welcoming our 8th volunteer this month working on these tasks. 
  • We have 2 more volunteers ‘waiting in the wings’ to be trained to write blog posts.
  • We are currently planning outreach events for which we require more volunteer support, so if you are interested in supporting us at our events please do get in touch, we’d be delighted to hear from you.

With volunteer opportunities and a call-out for archival material is underway, there are lots of ways to get involved, so if you are keen to find out more, get in touch at wafaproject@walsall.gov.uk. 

A final thank you 💜

To all our volunteers - thank you. Your time, care and commitment are making a real difference in preserving Walsall’s heritage for future generations.

You truly are an essential part of the WAFA Project.