We are currently developing a funding bid to the Heritage Lottery Fund to widen the PAS volunteer base and reach new audiences in local areas, in the process increasing the PAS’ capacity to record finds. The PASt Explorers: finds recording in the local community project has passed the first round funding bid and we are now in the development phase, aiming to submit the second round bid in April and if we are successful, to start the project in November 2014.
The project aims to create community finds recording teams based around local FLOs. There will be one FLO who will act as lead FLO in a 'Regional Training Centre', covering several counties in an area, who will oversee activities. The teams will cover their local county and will help the local county FLO record finds and do other aspects of finds recording work, including outreach. The project will provide high standard training for the volunteers and we are currently developing this training programme. The idea is that the volunteer teams will eventually be able to look after themselves, guided by one person appointed as lead volunteer in the project but ultimately steered by the local and lead FLOs and also that the volunteers are equipped with new skills. As part of the project we will also be developing an online resource, the County Pages, which will be a part of the PAS website devoted to finds recording in the county by the volunteers. We will be including self-recorders and detecting club reps who wish to record their clubs finds as volunteers in the project, which means that they will also be able to access training and support in recording their finds.
As part of the development phase we are currently running a pilot project in Leicestershire to establish how the project could work practically and to assess what resources we will need longer term. The pilot project has been working very well, with the FLO and volunteers getting a lot out of the project.
I am sure that this has worthwhile ideals and the aim of increasing recording capacity for the PAS laudable. However i would question the validity of the argument that by reaching new audiences with the volunteers, will actually help the situation we have at present, whereby the PAS FLO's cannot deal with the level of finds currently reported to them. The charge from the detractors of detecting who constantly bleat that detectorists dont report all their finds when will remain, whilst we all know that ideal is impossible to achieve with the resource limited PAS we have ,so what is the logic behind burdening FLO's with more management responsibilities to deal with the volunteers rather than recording their finds backlogs even after introducing filtering guidelines to reduce it. Why should their core duties be diluted in efficiency terms, on the promise that new finds reporters will be identified by the Volunteer expansion project, in the hope of an increase in the number of finds being reported overall. One would suspect that many of the new reporters gathered up by the local process, will be non detectorists burdening the system with finds from dog walking to buckets full of misc items from the allotment to full blown non professional fieldwalking assemblages, the quantity and quality of which will bog down the system. It could be read that the PAS see their future expansion of finds recorded, as coming from easier to deal with non detected material. After all a thousand ceramic and lithic finds plus one Roman coin tells more of a story than six Roman coins and a brooch submitted by a detectorist from the same area. That one millionth recorded item is coming closer is this a way using other money sources,to make the second and third easier and quicker to achieve for their political masters to consume and present to the media.
ReplyDeleteOn another aspect volunteers are by nature a variable bunch in ability and capacity to carry out the duties they sign up for. Some will drop out early and others will fall out with others in the group and walk away and so on. Whatever the training they are given many will simply not have the time and dare i say it the consistency of expertise to record without taking up valuable FLO time to supervise. Who will the lead volunteers be and what background will they have to set them aside from mere volunteers and more importantly for all, what level of security will be built into the system so that the findspots data is kept confidential from third parties.
Interesting times we live in.
Thanks for dropping by again Steve. It does seem that in the current economic climate trying to get volunteers to do things is seen as a magic answer although for the same reasons that the Conservatives dropped the 'big society' message there are somethings that really aren't ideal for a volunteer to do and this may be one of them.
ReplyDeleteWhat the response didn't make overly clear is whether the regional FLO will be a new post. One would hope so.
It will be interesting to see what balance between spreading the word and helping the existing burden will be.
I would suggest that the money for this project is time limited and allocated so it would be unlikley that it would siphoned off to support the PAS. It would seem to be a stand alone project. The PAS has been stuffed by the Spending Reviews of recent years with more to come and so will be looking to other sources of funding to carry out its core functions and this may be a way to test the water with the paymasters and politicians. The problem will be that outside funders will want various results and favours in exchange for the money as we saw with the Hidden Treasure type programmes where the fund masters were calling the shots.
ReplyDeleteIt would be a pity if the PAS became subservient to other parties and so lost its direction in some ways. It has had to reinvent itself time and time again and no doubt will continue to do so just like the regenerations of a certain Timelord.