Afternoon Nick.
Your request for an opinions gave me an excuse to stir up a little
discussion about HER recording for various audiences. It is also interesting
to examine the tension between adhering to tight common recording standards
and the 'horses for courses' approach, whereby we do more or less what we
like and hope that someone can stitch it together later with metadata and
various interoperability tools. Finally, there is the tension between the
credibility of an HER/SMR as an authoritative up-to-date resource for a well
defined range of uses, and one that is beautifully indexed for a huge
variety of enquiries, has many bells and whistles, but has a hopeless
backlog and is actually a very poor performer for its core audience. By the
way, did anyone else think how strange it was how little attention
'Benchmarks for HERs' gave to backlog issues?
I think that most of our recording decisions should be audience driven, as
far as possible, but I still don't think that, collectively, we have got
very far in forming sound methods or vocabulary for this kind of development
- or submitting our records to proper external scrutiny. Witness the number
of people who ask for assistance in doing potential audience surveys (over
and over again) for individual HLF bids.
Cheers,
Ben
PS I wondered if anyone else was being introduced to 'balanced scorecard'.
It appears to be a service planning and performance management tool, whereby
a local authority asks folk what they want (or guesses) and then gets a list
of statements like "I want litter free streets" or "I want planning
permission in under 5 weeks", that are translated through a complex process
into cross departmental actions. The idea is that everybody then only does
things to improve their service and answer the 'I wants'.
>>Ben wrote
I would be inclined to ask 'for whom is the mill and milling date
information intended?'
part of the question is as much about what we are trying to record for
our purposes, I am viewing this as a problem for how we as DC HER
officers try and do this. It is part of a wider thing I am fumbling with
about the difference between recording archaeology and monuments. For DC
purposes it might be enough to know (and I am not advocating this
necessarily) that a particular area houses archaeological deposits which
would require 6 weeks full excavation. In planning terms that is useful
information, whether that represents a monument of a moat, village,
castle, whatever is of much less interest to the planner/developer. That
is the sort of translation DC archaeologists do a lot (probably without
realising it) IE turning an interpretation ( A moated site) into an
amount of archaeology (ditch stratigraphy with the rest likely to have
been ploughed off by past land use) and advising Developer and planners
of the implications of this (full excavation for four weeks, a watching
brief, changed foundation design).
I am not sure where I am going with this (though it could possibly
involve my own fundament....) but it is that I was trying to get to
grips with. Getting back to the original question, it was about the
difference between the Physical remains (The building) and the
Interpretation (Monument of Watermill), and whether/how we should be
trying to split them for recording. Like I said this is still something
I am fumbling with and not sure if it leads anywhere useful, but might
help explain my previous question.
For other users (IE non DC, or specifically, anyone outside of our
office who isn't as familiar with our system as us) they can phrase
their question as they like, and I will then, based on knowledge of how
we record stuff (which in itself is based on MIDAS etc), be able to
point them to a list of sites of possible interest, which they can then
pursue to whatever level of detail they like. If its unclear I can
clarify more. In the first instance. As time goes on we will aim to make
the system more user friendly, and a trade off is between making new
records ideally user friendly straight away and taking longer to
accession them, or making them partially user friendly and getting data
in quicker with the idea of recasting the data (probably as part of an
HLF bid) at a later date.
hope that makes some sort of sense, but am aware that it probably
doesn't
BTW what is LG balanced score card theory when its at home?
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