Support for Heritage Professionals

HER Forum

The Historic Environment Record Forum (HER Forum) is open to anyone with an interest in HERs. There are over 380 members including HER staff, conservation officers, consultants, students and a wide range of heritage professionals.

The group's purpose is to promote best practice amongst HERs. The chair is elected by the membership at one of the regular national meetings and sits on the Association for Local Government Archaeological Officers (ALGAO) (UK) HER Committee.

Our Heritage Information Partnerships team facilitates the working of the group and arranges:

• Two national meetings per year, usually with presentations on current issues and projects
• An email discussion list

To get a taste of the HER Forum email list you can browse the public archives.

Contact us to join the group.

Guidance for Historic Environment Record (HER) Services

HER Audit Programme

We help HERs to carry out self-audits that will provide you and your parent authority and Historic England with an accurate picture of the service and the data you hold. The process will enable you to identify forward actions that will develop and enhance your service.

Working to a HER Audit Specification, together we will produce a report covering nationally-agreed requirements for HERs including the following:

• Content and Coverage
• Data Standards and Security
• Access and Engagement
• Infrastructure (Service Delivery)

We will then work with you to identify actions that will help develop and enhance your service, and to plan your future progress.

One audit cycle usually covers a five year period after which we will invite you again for the next audit.

If you are interested in joining the HER Audit Programme, or have any other queries about the work of the programme, please contact us.

Audit Summaries

Audit summaries have been recently introduced into the HER audit programme. We will be publishing more summaries to cover all HERs in the audit programme.

Please click on the HER area you are interested in to read the summary of their audit.

Guide for HER host authorities

The Guide to Historic Environment Records (HERs) in England sets out how an HER host authority needs to ensure that an HER record is kept up-to-date with accurate information in order to meet the requirements of the National Planning Policy Framework (NPPF) for better support and an improved information base for the planning system.

HER outcomes framework

We have also commissioned a project to develop a method for HERs to measure progress against achieving their goals and those of their parent authority. You can see the report on this draft HER Outcomes Related Framework, which requires further work at this stage.

Working guidelines for HERs

Informing the Future of the Past: Guidelines for Historic Environment Records covers everything from how to create records to the legislative framework within which HERs operate. You can find these working guidelines for managing, running, using or supporting HERs as an online wiki.

Standards and terminology

Heritage Data Standards and Terminology tools are available for recording historic environment information accurately and consistently which, when applied rigorously, will improve data retrieval and access.

HER policy templates

We have created a library of templates for HER policy to help HERs when writing their own local documents:

If you would like any of these documents in an alternative accessible format please contact us.

HER21: Historic Environment Records for the 21st century

As part of its on-going strategy to support the development of HERs, we commissioned a programme of projects known as HER21 or ‘Historic Environment Records for the 21st century’. In addition to strategic research, 12 projects undertook to expand the content and coverage of HERs and provided methodologies accessible to other HERs. The results of the programme inform our forward looking national strategy for HERs.

Individual projects: