Early in the planning phase of the project Cambridgeshire’s Historic Environment Team approached exeGesIS with a view to developing an approach that would allow the new archive catalogue to be integrated into the Cambridgeshire Historic Environment Record (CHER), thereby allowing full cross-referencing of archive items with Monument and Event records.

The solution that emerged from discussions between Cambridgeshire’s archaeologists and exeGesIS heritage data specialists, was based around the County’s existing use of the Historic Buildings, Sites and Monuments Record system. Two custom administrator functions would be developed; the first to create spreadsheets that would be populated with archive metadata during the cataloguing process and the second to read the spreadsheet information back in to HBSMR, creating a source record for each archive item.

An important feature of the development was to ensure that archive items could be quickly recovered from DeepStore and returned to Cambridge. This relied on the inclusion of the Deep Store reference within the HBSMR Source record. This was achieved by labelling each of the archive boxes with a pre-prepared DeepStore barcode label. The barcode was scanned using an inexpensive, off-the-shelf scanner and the barcode data was automatically recorded alongside the other metadata in the spreadsheet for later upload to HBSMR.

The system has now been in use since March 2013 and over 17,000 archive items have been catalogued and over 10,000 boxes have been dispatched to DeepStore. Over 230 archive boxes have been successfully recalled to Cambridge so far for involvement in PhD research and public engagement opportunities.

Further information from Crispin Flower.

The project included the scanning of approximately 90 archive storage boxes containing paper HER Monument records and oblique aerial photographs, 9 archive storage boxes containing c400 Event reports in the process of being added into the HER, c1,000 plans of A3 size and upwards, Conservation Area files, Parish Survey files, c1,600 Historic Buildings and Buildings at Risk photographs and c7,500 slide photographs. In all some 13,000 images were scanned. Historic vertical aerial photographs from the 1940’s through to 1996 were also scanned and geo-referenced in order to enable viewing within GIS software.

All scans were of archival quality, documents were scanned as PDF/As using OCR, so as to make them searchable.

The scanned images and documents were linked to HBSMR records using our LibraryLink package. Links were created at the database level by exeGesIS, thereby avoiding a very drawn out manual process. This approach was made possible by adherance to a strict file/folder naming convention on the part of the scanning contractor. It has enabled available documents and images associated with a particular record to be displayed on screen at the touch of a button.

Further information from Crispin Flower.