C O N T E X T 1 3 4 : M A Y 2 0 1 4 49 The HER21 was developed as part of the strategy to make historic environment records consistent in content and in their integration with the planning system. The HER21 also needed to address the widespread issue that the change in title to historic environment record (HER) from the archaeology tool of sites and monuments record (SMR) was not necessarily reflected in HER service or content.The HER21work arose fromEngland’s proposed new heritage legislation linked to heritage protection reform (HPR), so all projects were intended ultimately to inform the creation of a national specification for HPRconsistent HERs’.There was an aspiration in the longer term to reshape HERs to become a credible statutory service to the planning system as a whole. The introduction to this series of articles on the HER21 projects (Context 130, July 2013) offers an invaluable frame to these reports as it identifies a critical duality at the heart of any historic environment record service. ‘HERs stress their benefit to the public. As signposts to information… they are complementary to the collections of museums… Balancing this is the support that HERs give to the work of local planning authorities.’ The article’s author, Richard Morrice, notes how that HER-duality of service, both as a cultural resource and as a planning tool, has circumscribed the ability of HERs, as public information resources, to address their more recent aspirations as planning tools for built environment practice. Areas of built environment information under particular scrutiny through HER21 included especially ‘skills’ for HER managers, reported in projects that included the development of generic job descriptions (6032: The Historic Environment Officer Managing an HPRcompliant HER), and the quality of the data standards (6034:Development of GISData Standards).The IHBC’s HER21 project title ‘Information and Partnerships’ recognised that partnerships would be critical in delivering the planning-related agendas of HERs, but its practical SEÁN O’REILLY From sites and monuments to the historic environment The practical focus of the IHBC’s HER21 project ‘Information and Partnerships’ was to provide a means of achieving a baseline of building information for the HER service. focus was to articulate a means of achieving a baseline of building information for the HER service. The immediate object was to ‘consider what data should be incorporated into the HER to widen coverage across the whole historic environment by the addition of new building and built environment records and data.’ This was intended to address issues of compliance with the priorities of the planning system. In reality as that compliance was at such an early stage, the initial priority was simpler: to develop a strategy to expand the ‘built environment data’ sufficiently to ensure that prospective users in the planning system would integrate the HER resource into their ordinary practice. Gaining a critical mass there could be the perfect carrot to extend HER-usage outside its core archaeological constituency, that generated by the ‘collection’ and information-based approaches that Richard Morrice referred to above. This would promote the evolution of information acquisition, management and priorities in HERs through direct contact with the new user-base it hoped to reach, especially in planning.More important, it did not focus on a top-down policy driver tomake services competent for use by building interests, but sought to generate a synergy between users that would give rise to a ground-up service ethos. The IHBC’s formal proposal determined ‘what data should be incorporated into the HER to widen coverage across the whole historic environment by the addition of new building and built environment records’. Here the institute’s unique resources of officers, networks and volunteers were exceptionally well placed to add value to the work.With both an historian and an architectural historian on the staff, both also experienced in planning and building conservation policy and casework, and a diverse range of specialist and non-specialist networks to engage with, the IHBC was well positioned to lead on establishing a testing ground to highlight where an SMR might consider itself to have achieved HER status.
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