Volunteer with MUHS

Volunteering with Milton Ulladulla Historical Society enriches your understanding of our local history and also helps us preserve and share our collection.

How much time can you give?

Some jobs require a regular weekly or monthly commitment but there are lots of other ways you can help, including with short but intensive projects or perhaps with a few hours now and then when you have the time. You don’t need to have any special skills to volunteer with MUHS.

Volunteering jobs

Cleaning and preserving our collection – learn how to clean and then wrap and pack our many old and fragile objects. Cleaning an object often reveals fascinating new insights about the maker, a previous use, or an old repair that we can document.

Photographing and scanning – learn how to create digital images of each object so we can easily share information about our collection. We have some of our own equipment and we’re also part of a digitisation hub, based at Shoalhaven Regional Gallery in Nowra, which has a small photography studio and a larger scanner. If you’re already comfortable with a digital SLR camera, that’s great, or we can teach you how to use the equipment.

Copy typing and editing – we’re also digitising our research papers so that a simple keyword search can find all the information we hold about a particular person, place or event. Old handwritten notes need to be typed up but anything already typed can be put through an OCR (optical character recognition) program/application. This creates fairly good copy but needs editing to resolve errors, especially from old and smudged type faces in newspapers and books.

Researching – become a historical detective. Sometimes we know a lot about our objects, but often there’s a lot more to find out about who used it, why and when, or even what it is! Learn how to use online resources, our library, social platforms and personal interviews to research an object.

Cataloguing – MUHS is creating a digital online catalogue using eHive which is accessible to everyone. Once we have researched and made digital images of an object we can upload that information to eHive. If you have web-based digital skills, that’s great, or we can teach you how.

Fund raising – MUHS raises money to pay rent on our storage spaces, and to purchase equipment and consumables. We’d love help to sell our promotional tea towels at markets and events, and to research and apply for community grants.

To volunteer with MUHS, contact us today at muhistsoc@gmail.com