Work is now about to get underway on developing the new Parks & Gardens Database and Website. We have appointed as IT contractors ALTCOM Ltd, who are based in Penzance and have done some very interesting work including developing the new website for the Jurassic Coast – www.jurassiccoast.com. We are all looking forward to working with them in developing the Parks & Gardens Database and Website.
The IT Project will run for about six months, starting this November. We will have the website up and running in the spring of next year, although it will still take another year at least before all the data is entered and made available. We will be starting with what data we already have, and will be adding data from many of the County Gardens Trusts.
The database will have two levels of record for Parks and Gardens; Basic and Detailed. As you might expect, the Basic records will have the name of the site, its location and some brief details about it. We will be including some key information about context, style, buildings etc, but no really detailed description. The Detailed records will contain more text, describing the site and its history, and include details of the planting (both current and historical), together with images.
We will also have a section of the database for people associated with Parks and Gardens, such as Lancelot (Capability) Brown, Gertrude Jekyll and many others.
From the website you will be able to search through the database to pick out the places in which you are interested. This could be by looking up the name of the site, looking at sites within a county, searching the database for sites with particular features, or sites associated with a specific person. The information on the site you select will then come up on the website, together with a map of where the site is and any images which we have of the site .
There will be a data entry facility which will allow our Volunteers to enter data through the website and put it into a secure place on the database, for checking (I almost said our database, but of course it isn’t – it will be YOUR database). Over the next few months we will be sending out information on what data we would like you to record, explanatory notes on data recording and notes on how to enter the data through the website. We hope that many of you will join our team of Volunteers to go out, record parks and gardens and put the information into the database.
John Warden
Data Manager, Parks & Gardens UK
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