As many of you will know from HER Forum presentations and committee meetings, the CBA is coordinating a First World War partnership engagement project to record the physical legacy of the Home Front across the UK. Good to see interest on the forum and I will respond to the various queries shortly.

We have been developing a website resource area and data-standardised recording toolkit for community groups, with funding from English Heritage, Historic Scotland and Cadw and in collaboration with ALGAO UK, RCAHMS, RCAHMW, the Welsh Trusts, NIEA and a number of other partners.

The project was launched by the CBA and English Heritage with Dan Snow on Thursday 6 March last week with extensive national and regional media coverage. Here's the BBC News video: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-hampshire-26471922

Wales and Scotland are launching the project this week with follow up activity once the project gets going.

A briefing is attached to give you some more background to the project, and detail the functionality of the recording app, and the data exchange process between the community recording data submitted and the HERs/SMRs.

To summarise: when data is submitted through the HTML5 recording app it populates a MIDAS compliant database, which HERs will be able to export using a password in either CSV/Excel spreadsheet or XML format.

The app itself uses 'locate me' OS/Bing/Google mapping technology to establish the NGR and enables dropdown menu selection of First World War terms from the English Heritage Monument and Sites and Building Materials thesauri. It also enables file and image attachments for site plans/photos and associated sources.

You can read more in the attached brief and see a screengrab from the app, project logo and press release or go to the HER Forum file sharing area here: https://www.jiscmail.ac.uk/cgi-bin/filearea.cgi?LMGT1=HERFORUM&f=/CBA

The project is above all a collaborative venture to promote good practice in data exchange between community groups, and university and community co-research through AHRC-funded First World War Centres (tbc), and HERs. We are looking for sources of funding for community training to include raising the profile of the HERs.

The data-standardised app has been developed to encourage online submission to reduce potential workload for HERs receiving paper forms from Centenary projects. The project partners hope it will set a standard and framework for future community engagement right across the UK as well as increasing our First World War records and future protection for sites.

I hope this is helpful and that you will be able to promote use of the toolkit for the Centenary.

Many thanks,

Louise