Series details: CRDA/67

The Local Heritage Initiative (LHI) was launched in England in February 2000 as a grant and advice programme to help local groups to investigate, explain and care for their local landmarks, landscape, traditions and culture. The LHI programme was administered by the Countryside Agency and funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) with additional sponsorship from Nationwide Building Society. As a major part of LHI the Countryside Agency developed a website to enable project groups to showcase their work. In September 1999, the HLF awarded a grant of £1.25 million to develop, staff and maintain the ICT and website project. The intention was to build a website supported by a content management system (CMS) to allow project groups to update their own pages. While plans for the main website were being drawn up, the LHI launched a temporary site in 1999 to help raise awareness of the grant programme.

The main site (www.lhi.org.uk) was launched in December 2002. When the LHI ceased to award new grants in September 2006, the facility to upload project output material was removed, but the site remained available for viewing, and (as at February 2007) is now supported by HLF. The transfer to NDAD also took place in September 2006: data derived from the project directory and the associated project outputs in the form of documents, images, audio and video files were all transferred.

The LHI grant programme was administered by the Countryside Agency (CA); it was largely funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund (HLF) with additional funding from the Nationwide Building Society. The LHI website and ICT projects were operated by a website team drawn from Countryside Agency staff. The website and content management system was developed on behalf of CA by an external contractor, Torchbox Ltd.

The successor body to the Countryside Agency was Natural England, set up in October 2006. Although Natural England had no direct responsibility for this dataset, the organisation was involved in the loan of original documentation materials to NDAD in January 2007 (see the Dataset Documentation Catalogue, reference CRDA/67/DD/1).

The LHI website contained details of approximately 1,400 projects that had been funded through the Local Heritage Initiative grant programme. Central to the website was the project directory. This was a searchable online database containing details of all of the LHI funded projects. It was also a multimedia resource containing oral histories and other content, in the form of videos, images, graphics and text.

Alongside the main funding for the LHI programme, a separate application was made to HLF for funding to develop a website to enable the project groups to showcase their work. In September 1999, HLF awarded a grant of £1.25 million to develop, staff and maintain the ICT and website project for a ten-year period. From the outset, the intention had been to build a website supported by a content management system (CMS) to allow project groups to update their own pages. The ICT and website aspect of LHI was managed by a Project Board and Advisory Panel. In 2001 a contract to support and maintain the ICT platform and content management system was awarded to Torchbox Ltd. The newly designed and developed LHI website was launched in December 2002.

Most of the content was produced by the LHI project groups and was held in the project directory, this was intended to be a searchable online database holding details of all the projects that were funded by the grant programme. The content in the project directory included oral histories, videos and interactive tours as well as images, graphics and text. The project directory was managed by the LHI web team with technical assistance from the contractor, Torchbox. One of the web team's roles was to supply advice and support to the project groups in order to assist them to upload their content to the website. The amount of content on each project varied considerably. All project groups were allocated their own homepage on the LHI website. As a minimum this contained a short description of the project, its location, amount of grant awarded and contact details. This forms the basis of the data that has been transferred to NDAD, supplemented by the additional project outputs.

No further full accessions are expected as the LHI grant programme came to an end in September 2006.

The Local Heritage Initiative dataset and related dataset documentation are public records under the Public Records Acts 1958 and 1967. The National Archives has assigned the dataset and documents the reference CA1.

The Local Heritage Initiative dataset and related dataset documentation are open without restriction. Data is available for browsing on demand by users of NDAD and does not have to be booked in advance.

The Local Heritage Initiative dataset and related dataset documentation are copyright of the Countryside Agency, Heritage Lottery Fund and Nationwide Building Society. Copies may be made for private study and research purposes only.

The Local Heritage Initiative dataset and related dataset documentation is subject to registration under the Data Protection Act. The dataset contains personal data in the form of contact details (names, addresses etc) for individual projects. Data subjects have consented to publication of their contact details.

The language of the materials is English.

Documents related to the Local Heritage Initiative dataset have been transferred to NDAD. See the Dataset Documentation Catalogue for further details.

Additional project output material was deposited by CA with the University of Gloucestershire Archives forming the Local Heritage Initiative archive.

Not known.

No information was supplied by the department, but assumed by NDAD to be Microsoft Windows.

The LHI project directory data and associated multimedia items were a web-based application managed using a content management system called RationalMedia, supplied by CA's IT contractor Torchbox Ltd.

LHI used the RationalMedia Content Management System (CMS) developed by Torchbox Ltd. The CMS enabled the LHI web team to update the web site, upload images and multimedia content, and send out newsletters by email. The content management system also supported the individual editing of project directory pages by members of individual project groups. Each project group was allocated a unique user name and password to allow them to access their web pages on the LHI website. Once members of a group had logged in, they could edit their pages and add new content via a simplified user interface. See the Dataset Documentation Catalogue, reference CRDA/67/DD/4/1, for a screen image of the RationalMedia edit screen.

The LHI dataset held by NDAD contains six tables. Three of these (Project, Grants and ProjectCategory) contain data derived from a CSV file containing details of approximately 1400 LHI projects supplied by CA. Two tables (Projectoutputs and Photographs) are derived from a related Microsoft Access database created by CA as part of the process of managing the LHI project outputs. The sixth table (All object files) was created by NDAD to hold links to the project documents, images, audio and video files that were transferred alongside the project directory data. This table is linked to the Project, Grants and ProjectCategory tables via the field 'Project Reference'.

Data on individual projects was entered either by LHI web team staff or members of individual projects, using the CMS. Information supplied to NDAD by CA indicates that the data entry was validated by system code within the CMS and signed off by the LHI web team before upload to the web site.1

Details of the content and transformation validation checks performed by NDAD on the Local Heritage Initiative dataset are recorded in the Dataset Catalogues: see Links to dataset catalogues.

Dataset catalogues provide more detailed information about individual datasets, and are currently available for the following dataset(s):

1. Data Owner transfer form for the Local Heritage Initiative dataset, received by NDAD in April 2005.