Cambridgeshire Heritage Gateway Pilot

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Cambridgeshire Heritage Gateway Pilot
Sarah Poppy sarah.poppy_at_cambridgeshire.gov.uk
Heritage Gateway Previews
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Why join the Heritage Gateway?

• Rapid and cost-effect means of establishing HER
  online
• Strong belief in common access point to Historic
  Environment information
• No need to reinvent the wheel!
• Economies of scale and potential for future
  capacity building (mapping, delivery of proposed
  Register of Historic Sites and Buildings of
  England)

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Why we became a pilot?

• Involvement with Heritage Gateway via ALGAO and
  HBSMR user group
• Keen to test and demonstrate concept
• Long-term aspirations to put HER online
• Objective in Archaeology Service Plan
• Online HER access required to support newly
  established SLAs with districts
• Demand from local community!
• HLF route or in-house development not viable
  options
• Cambridgeshire was first HER to go live on the
  Heritage Gateway in April 2007!

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Processes involved HBSMR Gateway

• Had to follow local authority compliance
  procedure
• Some difficulty in engaging with IT department
• Dont underestimate time and effort required!
• Preinstallation discussions between IT
  department, exeGesIS and HER
• Software and hardware prerequisites (SQL server,
  web server)
• Consideration of which data to put online
• Customisation of HER record layout
• 2 day site visit to install and configure
• Desktop routine to manually upload HER data
• Remote support provided by exeGesIS and IT
  department

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What the HG is intended for?

• Increased public and education sector access to
  HER records, without need for consultation
• Provide background/context information for all
  research
• Enable HER resources to be targeted at
  professional enquiries, data enhancement and
  digitisation and future developments e.g. meeting
  requirements of HPR
• Building much-needed links between local and
  national datasets

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Major fieldwork projects W of Cambridge 1990-2006
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What the HG is not intended for?

• Not replacing the need for planning-related HERs
  consultations
• Why not?
• Some datasets not accessible via HG, such as
  Scheduled Monuments, Listed Buildings, fieldwork,
  cropmark transcription
• Will not contain information about projects in
  progress
• Sensitive sites may be withheld from public
  access
• NGRs are 6-figure only
• GIS data not available at present

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Potential concerns

• Quality of data
• HER data is published as is
• Culmination of 5-year data enhancement project
• However no mediated public access content, and
  older records of variable quality
• Loss of income
• Average 4k p.a generated from HER enquiries
• Income from other sources e.g. SLAs, selling GIS
  data
• HG should not replace planning-related enquiries
  - will require monitoring!
• Standing still was not an option

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The future dissemination and beyond

• Spreading the word
• Launched at Cambridgeshire Archaeology Forum in
  June
• HG preview events at five locations
• Hands-on sessions in libraries and learning
  centres
• Local society workshop at Cambridge Antiquarian
  Society Conference
• Promotion via CCC website
• EH project to make village/parish linkages

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The future dissemination and beyond

• In the future
• Formalising IT support arrangements
• Collation of feedback and web-statistics
• HLF bid in preparation for community archaeology
  project includes development of online education
  and thematic resources
• Ongoing digitisation projects to add supporting
  content and resources (grey literature, images
  etc)
• Key requirement is ability to hyperlink to single
  HG record