Department of the History of Art, Oxford University

In the autumn of 2018, TASO was approached by the Visual Resources Assistant of the department who needed volunteers to help with the transfer of 50,000 photographic slides from plastic sling files to conservation standard slide boxes in order to create more space in the department. Three volunteers met weekly from October 2018 to March 2020 and very nearly completed the project before the Covid 19 pandemic forced the University to close.

Historic Garden Recording 2018

This was part of a national initiative to celebrate the tercentenary of the 18th century landscape gardener, Capability Brown’s birth in 1716. Approximately 20 TASO volunteers worked in smaller groups with Oxfordshire Gardens Trust to record, as far as possible, all the Capability Brown gardens in the county. Rycote, Kiddington, Adderbury, and Nuneham Courtenay. On completion, the records were then passed to the Oxfordshire Gardens Trust to be included in the national register of Parks and Gardens.

St Peter’s College, Oxford

In January 2015, a group of TASO volunteers began a lengthy project to preserve student records between the dates 1927 to 1970’s when the college moved from Permanent Private Hall to full College status. Meeting weekly, the task for the volunteers was to remove all rusted paper clips and staples etc from each file and transfer them to relabelled archival quality envelopes.
St Peter's Thank You Cake
The work, supervised by the college librarian, was not difficult but was painstaking and very useful to the college. When completed 15 months later, as a grateful thank you, the college laid on a small celebration party where a special cake and glass of Prosecco was enjoyed!

 

 

Harris Manchester College

In the autumn of 2011, at the request of the then HMC librarian a small group of TASO volunteers began a project at Harris Manchester College to clean and transfer to conservation standard boxes a large number of late 19th and early 20th century glass slide photographs in the HMC collection. Many of the images were of Oxford University buildings and colleges which made the project interesting for the volunteers. A number of the slides were then included in a mobile University historic glass slide exhibition. At a later stage, the whole collection was also digitalised as an internet resource.

For more information on Heritage Conservation generally go to the The Arts Society, Heritage Volunteering