Knowledge Integration are thrilled to announce the launch of the new East Sussex Historic Environment Record using the Arches for HERs platform. Though currently internal, once public Portico will act as the gateway to all historic environment data for East Sussex and Brighton and Hove.
The new, internal-only East Sussex Historic Environment Record (ESHER) was launched in October 2024, leveraging the Arches for HERs platform. This is a particular flavour of Arches designed for Historic Environment Records (HERs) comprising 17 resource models, FISH controlled vocabularies, and casework and consultation workflows.
East Sussex’s decision to migrate from their previous database, HBSMR, was one made over many years, and partially delayed by the pandemic, but ultimately the open-source nature of Arches was one the main determining factors. Arches for HERs also offered many other appealing features such as its flexible and automatic consultation letter generation, fast and easy HER searches and exports, and the theoretical unlimited number of user accounts. These come in addition to Arches’ modern, web based user interface.
The migration process began in January and supplied a unique set of challenges. Not only did the several hundred legacy CSV files need to be converted into Arches format, but also transformed and mapped to the specification of the Arches for HERs resource models. This included tasks such as splitting out specific types of Monuments into Areas, subsuming various types of Designations into existing Monuments, and splitting Consultations based upon stage. Migrated into Arches were over 35,000 records relating to archaeological discoveries, historic buildings and other historical information. Historic and current consultation data was also migrated, in addition to all digital assets.
Although intricate and convoluted at times, we are grateful to have been involved in such a project. As the first large-scale migration from HBSMR to Arches, we have learnt a great deal and hope to further this knowledge for future HERs. We want to give a huge thank you to both East Sussex County Council and Historic England for their assistance throughout the project; their help was invaluable at times and we would not have achieved such a successful migration without it.
ESHER is the second HER to use the new Arches for HERs application after the combined launch of the Greater London Historic Environment Record and version 1.0 of the Arches for HERs application. Thanks to ESHER being an early adopter, Knowledge Integration had an important role in the development, testing and bug fixing of the Arches for HERs application. We aim to continue this role in the future of this application, and have already made a start on upgrading Arches for HERs to the Arches LTS version 7.6.
While Portico is currently only internally accessible to East Sussex County Council, the aim and eventual target is to make Portico publicly accessible so members of the public can freely browse the historic environment of East Sussex and Brighton and Hove. A date is yet to be set for the public launch, however both Knowledge Integration and East Sussex County Council have started planning out the work that needs to take place.
