Historical society treasurer Phil Stevenson said over the last couple of months, 10 active volunteers have been scanning documents, taking photos and researching the history of particular items at home.

"We are still working on collating and scanning the Central Western Daily negative photographs and creating an index database for the collection," he said.

"We are still discovering new things with the photo collection and found between 1861 and 1899 the majority of the newspapers were lost in a flood on Anson Street and we have found one page that survived from that period."

He also said they scanning and digitising old local plans, maps and large photos.

"We anticipate by the time we scan and digitise those items there will be at least 2000 of them," Mr Stevenson said.

"Over the past four years, we have been working on identifying and assessing 15000 photos from the old Electrolux factory and we have several people who work on that project every Friday."

Mr Stevenson said they stopped work briefly at the peak of the coronavirus pandemic as the majority of volunteers fall into the vulnerable category.

"We have members who are aged between 70 to 80 years-old," he said.

"Our active volunteers have been working from home and have digitised over 100 different historical items and have written statement of significance documents about the objects."

"We have started to meet face-to-face on Fridays in our cottage, but we are limited to the amount of people that can meet, everyone has to sign in before entering and hand sanitiser is provided."

He also said last year they has bi-monthly public meetings but it has been put on hold because of the coronavirus.

"We used to have speakers come in to talk about a variety local historical topics on orcharding, mining and the medical industry," Mr Stevenson said.

"We haven't been able to organise a speaker night because of the restrictions on numbers."

The Orange and District Historical Society is open to the public on Wednesdays from 10am to 4pm on 148 March Street.