Mel's Volunteer Story: Leeds Museums in Google Arts and Culture
Leeds City Museum is celebrating the community with its latest special exhibition. "It Takes a Community" explores and showcases the ways that the Museum works with communities in and around the city to tell their stories as part of Leeds history. Each community's involvement is invaluable in making the Museum what it is – an enlightening place to learn about Leeds.
As part of the exhibition, Leeds Museums and Galleries worked with the Google Arts and Culture initiative to bring the museum's community collections from the archives to the audience – all by the internet. Anyone with an internet connection would be able to view over three thousand objects from the museum's collection.
But what work goes into making such a thing possible? Volunteer Mel is here to offer their insight into how they helped to make the collections accessible.
It all started in February 2026, when the team of volunteers and I were first shown the list of over 3000 objects, numbers, titles and descriptions – a daunting task for the three of us! The work ahead of us would involve making sure each object had an accurate and appropriate description and a high-quality image. But with all of us working together, I knew we could do it. With the edits I made to the spreadsheet, we made communication and collaboration easier, helping each other out where we could.
We were taught to use the museum's database software as part of our work, proofreading the names and descriptions of the objects in the collection. It was greatly insightful to see just how much the museum had collected over the years through the perspective of each individual item entry. There were objects displayed in previous exhibitions, or never displayed at all, from all sorts of people and cultures, and from events such as the 2012 Olympics and Leeds Festival.
While working on the project, we each got to learn about a lot of these objects. Callum has written about his favourites over on his blog, and here I'll write about some of mine.
One of the first objects that caught my attention was a chocolate box from presumably the late 1800s – not just because I like chocolate, but because of what was inside. This chocolate box was being used to store ribbons and buttons. It reminded me of when I was younger, looking in biscuit tins only to find my family's sewing bits and bobs. It's funny to think about some Victorian youngster having the same experiences as me – some things never change.
Another interesting object was the 2019 Leeds Mayor's postcard, which I'd previously written about for my Christmas Cards blog! It was really cool to see an object on the list that I already recognised. I also liked seeing all the photographs and business cards from the Thought Bubble Comic Festival in 2016, which I attend every year that I can.
But the item that means the most to me, the one with the most meaningful story for me, is the 302.0 badge. It was made by Paul Furness in 1978 when he worked at Leeds General Infirmary, using an NHS name badge to print the numbers 302.0 - the medical code for homosexuality. He had read the number on a patient's file who had been diagnosed with Homosexuality, which at the time was seen as a mental illness.
Furness gave one copy of the badge to Tom Robinson, who campaigned for the removal of the classification – the other copy is one we're honoured to have in the Leeds Museums collection. Its powerful message is relevant even today, as transgender people face the same discrimination of being seen as diseased or disordered. I hope that one day, all kinds of discrimination are just as outdated.
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.
