Callum's Volunteer Story: Leeds Museums in Google Arts and Culture
My name is Callum Rushworth and I am a frequent volunteer at Leeds Museums and Galleries, as well as a member of Leeds City Museums Preservative Party. I was given the opportunity to help with the Google Arts and Culture Project in February 2026. All of the objects relating to communities were gathered into a large spreadsheet and it was mine and a few other volunteers’ jobs to work through the objects on the sheet and ensure they had useful, updated and non-offensive descriptions and good quality images, flagging any objects that did not meet these criteria. We finished the entire sheet of 3379 objects in August 2026, which felt like an incredible achievement.
While working through the sheet, I really enjoyed the experience of being able to see so many kinds of objects in our collection. There are pictures, sculptures, empty cans, magazines, clothes, vinyl’s, newspaper clippings, shampoo, conditioner, flyers, business cards, zines, stickers, poster boards, flags, placards and much more, all coming from different people, community groups and cultures. It’s important to make as many of these objects and stories as easily accessible as possible and being part of a project aiming to do just that felt amazing. I also really enjoyed working with the Museum System, the database we used to search for objects in the collection.
There were a ton of objects I remember. One of the first was a collection of objects donated by a band who performed at Leeds Fest 2009 called Surprise…Fire. Many performing artists had the opportunity to donate objects and their experiences to the museum and these guys decided, alongside other items, to donate two empty cans of alcohol which could be mixed to make their ‘festival concoction’. I found it hilarious at the time, but looking back it’s cool that the stories we attach to objects can give even empty beer cans a place in history.
Another was a late 1980s flyer advertising a comedy show by Julian Clary, who I remember watching and really enjoying from a recent season of Taskmaster. I got surprised by a different advert for one of his shows in the Leeds Other Paper too, which was an alternative Leeds newspaper I was doing my Master’s by Research on, so it was cool to see him pop up again. I was pleasantly surprised in the same way by issues of the LGBTQIA+ Pink Paper in the collection after citing it in my Masters, which I really enjoyed reading.
I also noticed objects in the community collection that were involved in the Overlooked exhibition the Preservative Party curated a few years ago, such as the identifier badges made by Doodlepeople or a recreation of the scrapbook created by Gary Galvin on the case of David Oluwale. I look back on this time with a lot of fondness and it’s great to see that objects and stories that mean a lot to me to become accessible to more people. Overall, working on the Google Arts and Culture project was an amazing experience and I’m looking forward to seeing them online in the future!
If you would like to learn more about these objects and many others, check out the LMG Google Arts and Culture page at home, or come see the objects for yourself at Leeds City Museum when It Takes a Community opens in October.
