This project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) was concerned with facilitating a dialogue between the academy, heritage practitioners and wider community audiences through a shared engagement with existing historical research produced from local, national and international archive resources available in the city of Birmingham. The ‘stories’ contained in the archives hold an important key to understanding urgent social issues surrounding citizenship, identity and belonging. In this context the project, a partnership between the School of Education and Birmingham Central Library, extended an awareness of the diverse histories of the city in its many voices and cultures, making research on archive collections more available to the public. The project presented a series of public workshops in community libraries and other venues about Birmingham’s history, placed 10 related learning guides on-line alongside digitised archive material and organised a series of workshops for heritage practitioners to help foster an understanding of the historical and potential community vale of collections in their care.
