AN ARCHIVES scheme has received a £135,600 Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) grant to continue its work.

The Saltaire Stories project, which features artefacts from the village’s history, will cost a total of £150,200 between this year and 2019.

The grant has been handed to its organisers, The Saltaire World Heritage Education Association, which has provided the remaining £14,600 to fund the project for the next two years to help promote the village’s heritage. The grant will be used to help fund two part-time archivists and an IT worker who will help digitise key elements of the collections and, through a single web portal, allow online public access to the collections for the first time.

It will also help fund an educational programme involving universities, colleges and schools and give volunteers access to a number of training opportunities. The archive has 4,300 items catalogued, with a further 1,000 yet to be archived.

The HLF’s grant was increased from £123,000 after its representatives visited to see the archive project. The archive is owned by Shipley College, in trust for the community, and has a dedicated room in the college’s learning and resource centre.

A group of volunteers have been working to establish a conservation and management plan for the historical documents, images, press cuttings and artefacts held there.

Maggie Smith, trustee of the project, said: “It is great to have this funding secured. We can now move on in a certain way now. It is great to now be able to get key aspects of the project archived. While the archive is relatively small, it covers aspects of people’s lives. It covers a huge range of things in a relatively small number of items. We have 11 volunteers working on the project at the moment. We are trying to recruit some more volunteers to help with storytelling and collecting other stories and items.”

Part of the collection will go on display on Saturday, April 22, between 10am and 4pm, in Shipley College’s exhibition building, Exhibition Road, Saltaire.

The association’s main source of its own funding for the project was raised through an Adopt-a-Box initiative. These specially-created archive boxes feature items including private papers of the Salt and Roberts families to personal collections donated by people who lived in the village or who worked in Salts Mill.