More than a dozen Wingham High School students are getting in touch with the region’s history through a program using the archival and museum resources and volunteers of the Manning Valley Historical Society.

Students from the school’s year nine elective class have begun work at the Wingham Museum, which will see them helping out with a range of chores every two weeks during term three.

The program is designed to develop the students’ skills appropriate to the study of history in general and museum work in particular.

Students receive training from museum workers and will follow this with practical field work.

The students are involved in four sessions at the museum and will rotate through a different activity each time.

These cover the areas of indexing, filing, photographic restoration, cleaning and cataloguing, and exhibit labelling.

The students learn the fundamental skills of indexing a newspaper in order to facilitate future research. They will also learn to use a microfilm reader to view newspapers.

To achieve this, the students are allocated a page from an early Manning Valley newspaper and given the task of indexing and cross referencing its contents.

In photographic restoration, students receive training in the scanning and digital enhancement of old and damaged photographs and will learn to use computer software to practise their skills using photos from the museum collection.

They will also work with artefacts from the collection to learn cleaning techniques appropriate to such objects.

They will receive instruction in using MOSAIC, software used by the museum to catalogue objects and will be given the opportunity to apply this knowledge to catalogue actual objects.

The exhibit labelling and filing activity will see students learn how to devise labelling for museum exhibits to assist visitors in gaining insight and will practise this skill by identifying exhibits requiring additional information and constructing appropriate text.

It is the first time the museum and school have worked together to such an extent, though students have been involved in cleaning and preserving items in the past.

The students have also looked at the museum through the eyes of a visitor, being asked for opinions on various displays and ideas of how they could be improved.