Lochaber Archive Series: The story of Learn with Lorna
Archivist Rory Green continues his journey through the fascinating world of Lochaber Archive Centre.
It is time for our popular online Learn with Lorna talks to take a break over the summer but, don’t worry, Lorna will be back in September with a host of new stories from the archives.
The weekly talks have built up a dedicated band of regular viewers on Facebook since they started in April 2020, but we thought we would share a bit more information about them for anyone who hasn’t seen them yet as we enter our fifth year of broadcast.
As the world entered lockdown in March 2020, the Highland Archive Service had to come up with ways of keeping up our profile and connecting people to the collections without them being able to come into our centres in person.
The most obvious way to do this was online and community engagement officer Lorna Steele-McGinn came up with the idea of presenting a weekly online talk.
The initial idea was to provide a learning tool for parents who were now having to home school their children.
The first Learn with Lorna went out on April 2 2020 and spoke about diaries; why we keep them and what we can learn from them.
Aimed at a school age audience, we also provided activities to go along with the talk.
Although targeted at children, the talks quickly gained a loyal following of adult viewers who tuned in each week from all over the world.
The talks allowed us to highlight collections across all four of our archive centres - the Highland Archive Centre in Inverness; Lochaber Archive Centre in Fort William; Skye and Lochalsh Archive Centre in Portree and Nucleus: The Nuclear and Caithness Archive Centre in Wick and showcase the incredible work the team does.
The weekly talks have covered topics including authors in the collections, the Jacobites, fake news and reliable sources, witchcraft, tales from the asylum, theatres and cinemas, crime and punishment and the Clearances.
The Highland Archive Service carried out a survey of viewers which highlighted how important these weekly sessions were for people, for their own mental wellbeing as well as improving their knowledge of the Highland Archive Service and archives in general.
Fast forward four years and Lorna has just presented the 189th episode, 80 Years Since D-Day, and the most recent total viewing figures for all the episodes is a staggering 376,593.
I am sure you will agree Lorna deserves a well-earned break, but she will be back on September 5.
You can watch all previous episodes on our Facebook pages and our YouTube channel.
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