Our Search for the Stars project, generously funded by Esmée Fairbairn and the Headley Trust, aims to transfer all of our 40,000 paper-based object records over to our online collections management system. The project is making our collections accessible to everyone with some records already searchable through our website. Along the way the star searching team have also been identifying ‘star objects’ to be researched for our upcoming travelling exhibition; Fake News in the Age of the Horse.

This mammoth digitisation task is completely volunteer powered and has seen over 200 individuals contribute since it began towards the end of 2017, with many working remotely from all over the world. Recently we’ve stepped up our efforts with a further 20 volunteers registering to be involved in the last week alone, fuelled by social distancing and isolation in the UK and across the world because of the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. As of the beginning of March we had transferred 14,000 objects records and we’re hoping to head towards the half way mark quicker than we initially anticipated due to the increased interest in remote volunteering.

If you’d like to join the team to help search for the stars in our collection please get in touch with our Curator Kate Knowlden on kate.knowlden@eastanglianlife.org.uk