Jennie Vickers and Hannah Niblett of the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre presented a paper at the Archives and Records Association (ARA) conference on 30 August. Their paper was called: Telling the Whole Story: Community partnerships and collection development in the Legacy of Ahmed project.

As an organisation the Ahmed Iqbal Ullah Race Relations Resource Centre undertake both outreach projects and heritage collection work, and the two have a symbiotic relationship: the outputs of community and schools-based projects (such as oral history interviews, teaching resources, donated ephemera, creative works and publications) are accessioned into the library and archive collections, ensuring that community voices are preserved for the long-term, but also building a bank of resources to support ongoing outreach work – both the Centre’s own and other people’s.

This paper was a chance for the Centre to articulate this and share with fellow professionals some of the lessons learnt about project-based collecting from the recent Legacy of Ahmed project.

For more information about the Paper, their blog post.