This dataset series contains details of the various projects supported by the Local Heritage Initiative (LHI). The records provide information regarding local heritage projects giving descriptions of the projects, photographs of work undertaken and details of the groups involved in the work.
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 the Heritage Lottery Fund (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 dataset.
The datasets in this series are available to download. Links to individual datasets can be found at piece level.
The National Archives
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