Citizen Scholarship in Nottingham: understanding the value of engaging users with heritage and culture

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This follow on funding project, developed in collaboration with the Theatre Royal and Nottingham UNESCO City of Literature, represents an important opportunity to work with partners across the city of Nottingham to establish frameworks both for enabling participation in cultural and heritage activities at a local level and for understanding the value of such participation in terms of the experience of the organisation and the individual. The project uses the small Heritage Lottery Funded project - 'Our Theatre Royal Nottingham: Its Stories, People & Heritage', led by the Theatre Royal in collaboration with the University of Nottingham and commencing in February 2017 - as a case study to develop, test and evaluate the innovative, transferable model, 'Citizen Scholarship'. The Heritage Lottery Fund project itself developed out of the AHRC funded research project 'Mapping Performance Culture: Nottingham 1857-1867' (2006-09) which led to a key collaboration between the University of Nottingham and the Theatre Royal. Building from the experience of the Theatre Royal HLF project, we will work with pilot organisations across Nottingham to develop, test and evaluate an innovative, transferable model of 'Citizen Scholarship' for development and support of archives and histories, enabling communities of volunteers to participate in collection, curation and annotation of archive material and oral histories while developing basic research skills through supported training and activity. The value of volunteer engagement with this activity in terms of wellbeing and cultural enrichment will be evaluated through observing volunteer archive sessions, conducting focus groups and interviewing volunteers and other users of the Theatre and archive. Through the provision of this case study and structured activities to share knowledge and learning from this evaluation with a wide range of smaller cultural and heritage organisations in Nottingham, the project will enable an important shared learning opportunity and support those organisations in designing future engagement and evaluation activities with their audiences. As an outcome of this research, a set of best practice guidelines and a 'toolbox' for Citizen Scholarship participation and engagement, including a publically accessible digital platform for co-curation of archives and histories and frameworks for the evaluation of user engagement through this methodology will be developed. These will be trialled and tested with organisations in Nottingham; the final version will be shared within the UK and Europe through the Heritage Lottery Fund (via the Theatre Royal project) and and more widely through the UNESCO Creative City Network.