News

MLFHS Help Desk volunteers getting up to speed.

Manchester and Lancashire Family History Society will be staffing the Family History Help Desk when Central Library reopens its doors on Saturday 22 March 2014. But before that we have been building the teams of volunteers who will be in attendance to help with family history problems from 10.30 to 3.30 every weekday. Our teams consist of a mixture of volunteers. Some are former members of the team which staffed the Help Desk at City Library and who have enjoyed a brief holiday since the temporary library closed last year. Others have worked for many years in our Resource Centre in Clayton House, assisting Society members with their research, and who now look forward to sharing their knowledge with a wider public. The third part of the mix is a group of new volunteers who will be taking up this challenge for the fitst time. We'll be aiming to have a balanced team on duty each day. The refurbished Central Library and some of the procedures will be new to all of our volunteers and so we have been running training sessions to help to fill the gaps in their individual knowledge. So far we have run three training sessions dealing respectively with Help Desk Basics, Online Collections and Administrative Procedures. Further training is planned and we will be continually refreshing our volunteers' knowledge as the need arises. So now we are all just waiting for opening day and the chance to meet you all.