Innovative Heritage

Natural and cultural resources

Project Description:

The Innovative Heritage project’s aim is to take community heritage initiatives into the digital sphere and progress the Echoes Network’s ecomuseum work. The project will provide support, mentoring and training so heritage groups learn new skills and engage a wider range of people to ensure a sustainable future. It will contribute to developing the Pembrokeshire ecomuseum movement to make heritage tourism an area-based and year-round experience. Harnessing digital technology to interpret collections and trialling new techniques, it will help to create innovative, high quality tourism products.

Project Outcomes:

The project worked with communities to help provide digital skills in meeting, networking, recording and editing.
Encouraged community history groups to tell some of the important but relatively unknown stories of their communities. This made use of research and work that was already ongoing within those groups, and encouraged communities to tell these stories in their own words.
At the time when this was initiated, there were very few Pembrokeshire-based audio podcasts available, and very few podcasts focussing on Welsh history. We made ten episodes, each lasting approximately 30 minutes in length and focussing on a range of heritage stories from across the county, plus five ‘bonus’ episodes that lasted 5 minutes focussing on some of the people involved in working or volunteering in community heritage

‘’Really enjoyed listening to this podcast, learnt some fascinating things, and it’s given us some brilliant ideas for some new events around Tenby’’

‘’Excellent talk with lots of interest for anyone researching their ancestors who were American GIs who came to Pembroke during WW2 in the build up to D-Day”

Lessons Learned:

The initial project intended to work with iBeacons, but it was decided to try and achieve some of the same aims with a different technology. One lesson here with technology that is intended for use with broad audiences is about uptake of the use of that technology. Some ideas, platforms or technologies take time to establish themselves, and for end-users to get into the habit of using them and also for cutting edge technology to become more available.