6.2 Volunteers and Output Targets
Having projected that a total of 106 people would volunteer to help the project, by the end that figure had reached 168. As noted in 4.0.6 above, those 168 individuals accounted for 698 volunteering "events", for an average of just over four 'volunteering instances' per person - a figure which by and large does not take into account the volunteer work people did in their own homes or outside the Archive, scanning or transcribing, for example. Impressively, from the project's point of view, between the first instance of recorded volunteering on March 15, 2010 and the last on October 19, 2011, there were 548 days, inclusive and including holidays (out of a total of 669 days for the project as a whole, from January 1, 2011 to October 31, 2011). In other words, if spread evenly across the whole of the project, there was more than one volunteer participation for each day of the project.
This high number of volunteers and volunteer participation, with their enthusiasm and dedication to scanning materials and sharing their heritage, meant that they easily raced past all of the projected targets for digitisation and websites: The total project target for scanned photographs and slides was exceeded ten times over, at 2,897 vs. 250; that for scanned documents by almost three times, at 287 (made up of 1,983 individual scans) vs. 100. In terms of the website, the final total of community web-pages approached five times the projected goal, at 244 vs. 50. There were 428 photographs uploaded to the web vs. the target of 50 (not counting Terry Wilson's Red Hill School website, which used scans made during the Red Hill Archive "Weekend" at the Archive and Study Centre); and 130 documents uploaded vs. the target of 50. This extraordinary level of activity clearly reflected in facilities, equipment use and project staff time. It had short-term budget implications as well, largely in the form of additional DVDs, which form part of the digital storage system, and the archival sleeves and boxes in which they're stored. Given the capacity of the newly-installed digital storage system it will be some time before additional capacity will have to be added; but the project experience suggests that that too could come earlier than expected.
Another of the unexpected features of the project insofar as volunteers are concerned were the geographical distances people were willing to travel to take part. In budgeting for volunteer travel, it was assumed that the majority would be locally based. In fact, most of those who took part, even leaving aside Archive "Weekends", lived some distance away, with West Sussex, Glasgow and Dorset at the extremes, and Devon, Oxford, Northamptonshire and London, among others, more in the middle. With these distances involved, there were implications for travel costs, accommodation and food.