Parks & Gardens (UK) report at The Gardens Trust AGM 2019

摘要

As you may be aware, in 2017 the Hestercombe Gardens Trust took over stewardship of the Parks & Gardens UK Database website with the support of a Transition Funding grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund. With this funding in place, we moved forward with various technical developments to protect the integrity of the database and ensure smooth operation of the website, which had been developed over the preceding 11 years. At the time of my last report one year ago, we were at the testing stage of the revamped database, and the new website had not yet been published.I am happy to report that the new website went live in March of this year, and the siteis functioning well — although we still have some way to go. If you have visited the site recently, you will notice that it is faster to load, has a much improved visual identity, and is fully mobile-responsive. Using a modern, open-source Content Management System has made the data inputting and web editing much simpler; and whereas the old system was bespoke and needed constant maintenance and upgrades, this has regular software updates from the Craft system developers, thus making it much more reliable and robust.The database, consisting of almost 10,000 records of parks, gardens and designed landscapes, was successfully moved by developers Yello onto the new system, at which point a great raft of inconsistencies and data errors were discovered. Whilst many thousands of these were cleansed during the transition process, we are still finding many legacy data errors as we go, which we compile onto an 'action' list, along with other user experience and technical errors. These are actioned on a monthly basis to keep the website moving forward.