Essex HER enhancement project progress update, September 2026: more than half of all records completely enhanced.
The EHER Enhancement process aims to bring all of our existing monument, event and source records up to the required standard.
The first stage of this project was to integrate all of the grey literature backlog and create new records as required. The second stage of this project was to enhance all other monument, event and source records in the EHER.
At the start of the project, all monument, event and source records were assessed, and it was determined that those records ‘in scope’ for enhancement included:
- 32,164 monument records
- 9,451 event records
- 32,264 source records
Since the start of the project, the team has modified 19,900 existing monument records, representing 62.2% of the ‘in scope’ monument records. Likewise, the team has modified 5,615 existing ‘in scope’ event records, representing 59.4% of the total ‘in scope’ event records. All source records were considered ‘in scope’ for enhancement but the focus of the enhancement has been on published and unpublished sources (as opposed to photographic and archival references). The team has modified 9,851 source records, representing 30.5% of all existing source records.
In addition, the team has created 3,364 completely new monument records (an increase of 10.5%), 4,025 new event records (an increase of 42.6%) and 3,153 new source records (an increase of 9.7%). At the same time, duplicate or obsolete records have been deleted to ensure that the dataset only contains relevant and unique records.