Freelance Conservator for The Hold

Tender description

Suffolk County Council (Suffolk Record Office - SRO) and the University of Suffolk (UoS) have formed a partnership to deliver an exciting new heritage facility, called The Hold and to transform the SRO's approach to delivering formal and informal learning activities across the county. We require a Freelance Conservator to help deliver our vision for combining heritage with community engagement and education. A new flagship building will give the bulk of Suffolk's records a new, fit-for-purpose home and provide learning facilities within a unique visitor attraction in the vibrant Waterfront area of England's oldest, continually occupied town. More broadly, countywide The Hold will support sustainable partnerships with communities, learners, and researchers, enabling collections to be accessed by a larger, more diverse range of users. The Hold will deliver flexible, shared learning spaces with UoS, support a county wide strategic vision for heritage service development, UoS academic facility development, and further economic regeneration for the county town of Ipswich, as well as state of the art facilities for collections storage, management, access, and exhibition. As part of this project, SRO will be developing a new approach to working with communities and volunteers through the "Sharing Suffolk's Stories" (SSS) project; a key part of the Activity Plan for The Hold. This will include: • creating new on-line access to over 400 of the SRO's collection of parchment, paper, and tracing cloth maps (from the 1600s to present day, including manorial and estate maps, enclosure maps and awards, and 50-inch Ordnance Survey maps) with related information. • involving community partners and volunteers in enriching this digital map information with photographs (historic, aerial, and contemporary) and other historic information, including links to key archives and possibly oral history recordings, developing and delivering exhibitions online and across the county. • promoting the new enriched online map resource and other SRO resources through a range of public events, exhibitions etc and supporting guidance (including for schools) • preparing collections for relocation into The Hold and carrying out the move from Autumn 2019 - Spring 2020 (dependent upon the drying out of the building) with the support of volunteers (barcoding technology will be introduced to facilitate this). A part-time, experienced, freelance conservator familiar with the operation of passive strongrooms is required for 15 months from May 2019 - end of July 2020 ideally to work 4 days a week. The first 2 months of the contract will be spent on planning and preparations for the movement of collections into The Hold. In Spring 2020 there will be an intensive period of move activity and the remainder of the contract period will be equally split between the preparation for and the digitisation of maps and documents and work for the move.