– Know your Bristol –

Vaughan Postcard Project

 The Vaughan postcard project is a key strand of ‘Know Your Bristol On The Move’. Throughout the project community volunteers are researching historic postcards of Bristol and uploading their findings to an online historical mapping website called ‘Know Your Place’ (http://maps.bristol.gov.uk/knowyourplace/).

The postcards that volunteers are researching come from the Vaughan Collection, an 8,000-plus archive of early 20th century postcards of Bristol which were collected by Roy Vaughan and are now held at the Bristol Record Office. The postcards have already been ‘digitised’ (scanned-in and saved as images on computers) but, beyond some very basic information, there is very little information recorded about each card. This is where volunteers come in. The aim is to find out as much as we can about each postcard – Where and when was it taken? What does it show? What do you find interesting about this picture? – and upload this information to the ‘Know Your Place’ map.

We have a growing number of dedicated volunteers already researching the collection.

With over 8000 postcards in the collection, there is still plenty of work to be done!

If you are interested in volunteering on the project please contact Dr Nick Nourse on:  n.nourse@bristol.ac.uk You can see two worked examples showing the research process on another blog post here (link opens in new window)

The postcards are currently arranged into groups on the Bristol Record Office online catalogue (link opens in new window) under the reference number 43207. This follows the catalogue put together by Roy Vaughan himself.

In order to help our current and new volunteers to choose a set of postcards which will interest them and is not being worked on by anyone else, we have outlined below the sets which ARE currently being researched by volunteers. So any new volunteers should choose a set from the catalogue which is not listed below. This list will be updated regularly.

If you have any questions then Dr Nick Nourse, volunteer coordinator for the Know Your Bristol on the Move project will be in the Bristol Record Office (link opens in new window) Search Room every Tuesday morning from 10am – 12.30pm.

Postcards already being researched:

You can download a copy of the instruction document here: KYBOTM Vaughan postcard project instructions

And you can also download a copy of the copyright flow chart: Copyright Flow Chart (Tim Padfield)