Blog

Historic England chooses ResourceSpace to help them preserve and share their growing collections

31st July 2023

Welcome Historic England!

We’re delighted to announce that we’ve started working with Historic England - the public body that helps people care for, enjoy, and celebrate England’s spectacular historic environment. 

Historic England provides the main hub for all advice, research, publications, services and training on caring for the historic environment and, as part of a large digitisation project, we’re thrilled that they’ve chosen ResourceSpace as a core system to preserve and make the most out of their rapidly growing collections:

"The DAMS will be key to the delivery of the Historic England strategy to expand the availability of our assets widening access and participation by creating and sharing inspiring content. This is a crucial part of Historic England’s role in helping people care for, enjoy and celebrate England's spectacular historic environment.”

• Paul Wardle, Head of Archive and Library

Our collaboration will support the digitisation process and also enhance day-to-day operations within the Historic England marketing team and The Historic England Archive which is one of the largest publicly accessible archives in England.

The Archive’s mission is to care for and make available over 14 million items relating to England's historic environment including nationally important collections covering archaeology, architecture, social and local history. The collection includes images ranging from the earliest days of photography to today, capturing subjects as diverse as prehistoric hillforts, country houses and motorway service stations.

Metadata will be at the heart of this collaboration, and we’ll be working closely with their Digital Asset Management (DAM) project team to develop templates, integrate with collections management tools and build sophisticated workflows. Paul Wardle, Historic England’s Head of Archive and Library, sees this as one the organisation’s top priorities:

“In future, the DAMS will deliver a core role in the lifecycle of our digital assets within the Historic England archives systems framework delivering collaborative partnerships.”

Historic England’s vital work also includes managing the National Heritage List for England (NHLE) - the main register of all nationally protected historic buildings and sites in England. Listed buildings, scheduled monuments, protected wrecks, registered parks and gardens, and battlefield sites can all be found on the NHLE. ResourceSpace’s Geographic search feature will also be a crucial tool for this project. 

We’re really happy to welcome Historic England to ResourceSpace and very excited to have them on board! 

You can read more about the excellent work that Historic England are doing here, and browse the National Heritage List for England (NHLE) interactive map here.