Chris Webster
Somerset Historic Environment Record
Somerset Heritage Centre
Brunel Way
Taunton
TA2 6SF

01823 347434
Online HER: www.somersetheritage.org.uk 

The Somerset HER is managed for Somerset County Council by the South West Heritage Trust.

 

 

 

 

Hello,

 

Just a quick, but not necessarily straightforward, question arising from a few of my recent projects... How do/should HERs acknowledge and index the work of specialists when adding information to HERs?

 

This is an issue that I first thought about when working in the Norfolk HER, but at that time the enormity of the task of going back through all the grey lit and creating new source records for specialist reports which were part of the grey lit archive just couldn’t be justified in terms of the resource implications and the mountain of other more pressing tasks.

 

I came across this issue again last year when I worked on a Historic England-funded project for CIfA when I reviewed the standard of reporting on archaeological artefacts. My initial trawl of grey literature was somewhat hampered by the difficulties in identifying which grey lit reports actually contained specialist reports, as some contractors don’t necessarily list all the specialist contributions in the contents of their report, and sometimes individual specialist authors may not even be identified in the final version.

 

This issue has again been raised during the workshops that we have recently held for the revision of the Regional Research Framework for the East of England. This time, it has mostly been with reference to the difficulties faced when attempting to identify and locate suitable archive material for further analysis, and to determine which specialists have already looked at these archives as part of the post-excavation work. Many participants at the workshops felt that this is something that HERs ‘should’ be recording. However, in our region it seemed that none of them was, except where the specialist report was standalone (i.e. not part of a grey lit report or publication drawing together all the different types of evidence from a site or sites). The only reliable way of accessing this information seemed to be for researchers to deal directly with specialists and enquire of them which grey lit reports contained their specialist contributions. However, most specialists seemed to feel that this combination of not having their reports separately indexed and not being able to retrieve this information from HERs to some extent denigrated their contribution and exacerbated the problem of their work not being readily accessible or referred to.

 

I am interested to know (on- or off-list) whether there are any/many HERs who index specialist reports separately to the overarching grey lit report, so that, for example, all reports written by a single pottery specialist or bioarchaeologist might be returned via a standard HER search. This seems to be something that the research community would like HERs to be able to do, but I was wondering how realistic people working in HERs think this might be.

 

Thanks,

 

Alice

 

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Alice Cattermole Heritage Consultancy

9 Church Street

New Buckenham

Norfolk

NR16 2BA

 

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