CEN Community Archive Coordinator (360G-BNG-SOG-2023-00659)

CEN is seeking funding for continuation of the Community Archive Coordinator post.    The post holder has already added a wealth of bilingual material to the CEN website but there is still a lot of rich cultural information we would like to add. The postholder, a native Gaelic speaker,  is often the first point of contact people have with CEN.  She works closely with volunteers, mostly Gaelic speakers themselves, coordinating their ongoing assistance with the archive work.  The CEN archive provides opportunities for volunteers to engage in speaking and writing Gaelic as they assist with further research and digitising files. Visitors to the archive can hear the Gaelic language spoken at the heart of the community and  it makes an ideal environment for Gaelic learners.  The postholder also assists other CEN staff in delivering heritage related activities to service users along with a lunch and weekly telephone call in Gaelic. In-house publications such as our village booklets, Criomagan and other information booklets are produced by the postholder and she also creates all the Gaelic content for our social media channels and deals with the many enquiries we receive in regard to genealogy and local culture. She is also coordinating a major project on emigration which will run over 3 years from 2023-2025, working closely with local people, researching those who emigrated from the north Lewis area, where they went and what they did.