C: Recording practice guidelines#
Computer databases are important aids to information retrieval but, however good, they are merely tools that are used by people. To create records in these systems, people must make decisions about what information they need to retrieve, how it will be structured and how much detail to include. Different decisions are made by different individuals or even by the same person working over a period of time. These differences can cause considerable difficulties when it comes to answering a query that requires information to be retrieved.This section of the manual will give general guidelines for creating records based on the MIDAS data standard (see B. 6.3). The aim is not to set out detailed rules for recording but to describe general principles and issues to be considered for each of the major categories of information:
- HER monuments
- HER events
- sources
- objects
- planning casework
- monument management.
