The Linking Communities to Historic Environments (LCHE) research review assessed the broad range of projects and approaches that state-related organisations and civil society heritage bodies apply to engaging people with the historic environment. The review began with an expert advisory panel meeting, followed by a collaborative workshop between panel members, historic environment sector professionals who undertake engagement programmes, and participants who take part in engagement projects (see Appendix 1 for a list of contributors and notes). Two additional internal workshops were held at the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland (RCAHMS), to gather experiences and information from staff. The fourth and final element has been the writing of a discussion paper, based on a review of the literature and the assessment of engagement examples, including six case studies. The full discussion paper draws out and explores various issues from past experience of engagement. These issues include constant and on-going funding problems, institutional processes that affect projects, inward-facing attitudes by some professionals in the heritage sector, and technological advances that can help people engage with aspects of the historic environment. It is intended that the discussion paper will be submitted to the International Journal of Heritage Studies for publication (Hale forthcoming). This research review is a short summary of the full discussion paper.

'Taking forward a participative 21st Century Inventory' has been inspired by and builds on the research being undertaken by Beyond Text Collaborative Doctoral Award student Michela Clari, entitled 'In the hands of the user: changing patterns of participation and learning through the digital collections of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland'.\n\nClari's research is focussed on the early pioneering developments of RCAHMS in online user interaction and the use of social media. Her analysis and interpretation of RCAHMS work in this area has stimulated and informed RCAHMS to further develop the concept of a participative 21st Century Inventory of the built heritage of Scotland. \n\nThe project will create, evaluate and disseminate findings on a discrete set of online demonstrator applications that will provide facilities using live data to test the capacity of the public, professionals and academics to collaborate in 'making' and 'unmaking' the inventory of the built heritage of Scotland.\n\n

Cultural Heritage will, in the near future, be subject to substantial transformation in response to changing climate. Mitigation and adaptation measures will affect economic governance, and introduce sustainability pressures on buildings and landscape (e.g. thermal efficiency, renewables), in addition to the direct physical, chemical and organic impacts from the changing environment (e.g. coastal erosion, landslides, urban development material dissolution, microbial colonisation). Affects will occur on a range of scales that will drive changes in conservation needs. We desperately need to understand the resilience of the Cultural Heritage against these transformational pressures, from a material perspective, but also how we can be more effective in decision making and management from government to citizen level. A complex interaction exists between social and material aspects; scientific understanding and innovation plays a central part in our perceptions and valuation of the Cultural Heritage. As a result, inorder to meet future challenges there is a need to develop effective, adaptable management and decision making policies and methodologies, that utilise to best effect the latest scientific and technological developments. We aim to form a cluster that will establish, in a regional context for Scotland and Northern Ireland, a unified and interdisciplinary response to these threats and opportunities for innovation.

The Scottish architect and designer Charles Rennie Mackintosh (1868-1928) is today recognised internationally as an architect of world-wide importance. He occupied a pivotal point between the Victorian age and the Modern Movement, at an important period in the emergence of Glasgow as one of Britain's most important Victorian cities. His work has been an inspiration for subsequent generations including Aldo van Eyck, Hans Hollein, Arata Isosaki and Enric Miralles. Yet, remarkably, despite the extensive literature devoted to his career over the past 50 years, his core activity as an architect is conspicuously under-researched. \n\n'Mackintosh Architecture' will provide for the first time a comprehensive, in-depth evaluation of his achievements as an architect based on an innovative and authoritative combination of archival research and building survey and analysis. The three-year nine-month project will be undertaken by the University of Glasgow's Hunterian Museum & Art Gallery in partnership with Historic Scotland and the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland. The project will deliver a thorough analysis of the context, importance and contribution of Mackintosh's architecture.\n\nIt will generate the first detailed catalogues raisonnés of Mackintosh's architectural projects and his architectural designs, together with transcriptions from the practice job-books and other archival sources. It will systematically identify and research the wider networks of clients, contractors and tradesmen and define their contributions. Physical surveys by Historic Scotland and the Royal Commission will identify construction methods, materials, and technology used, and confirm the history of subsequent change. \n\nThe research data will be made available via a well-promoted, richly-illustrated, free-access, online database with the results analysed in a series of specialist, on-line essays and an exhibition and conference organised by the Hunterian at the conclusion of the project. The format of the outputs will ensure knowledge transfer to the broadest audience and serve as an invaluable aid to art historians, curators, conservators and heritage workers, the wider education sector and the general public.\n\nThe research will deliver other benefits. It will provide a valuable foundation for further evaluation of Mackintosh in the context of his British and international peer group, and support future studies in architectural and social history, including Glasgow's wider architectural history, the emergence of major Victorian cities in Britain, and the history of Victorian building trades. It will also support the recording and appropriate management of documented and currently unpublished built work. \n\nThe research process will provide a methodology for future evaluations of the oeuvre of individual architects. The website will provide a model for the presentation of an individual architect's output. The majority of currently-available on-line architecture-related resources provide either collection listings, picture sites, or brief illustrated essays. No authoritative single-figure sites exist delivering comparable comprehensive, in-depth, well-illustrated building data, designs, photographs, archival material and analysis.\n

Hillforts are the most impressive field legacy from the Iron Age across many areas of England, Wales, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Eire. Although precision is not possible, it is likely that there are over 4000 in Ireland and Britain. Any academic or popular account of later prehistory from c. 1000 BC has to include a discussion of hillforts as the dominant monument type: their forms and architecture, possible functions, relationships with their setting and archaeological surroundings. Over recent years within Iron Age studies the importance of 'regionalisation' has emerged again as an important theme and one which requires information and data to be available at both the local level and at regional and inter-regional scales. There is no integrated system that will provide this information for hillforts, although a wide variety of sources exist in digital and paper form. These sources however are diverse, often difficult to access, and hard to integrate to produce wider interpretations and new research questions, since all previous syntheses have generally been at 'national' (i.e. Ireland, England) scales. Furthermore, most of the ways in which these sites are usually described are based on upstanding examples, but it is now essential to incorporate many ploughed-down remains, only visible as cropmarks, into understandings of these sites. This project will create an online interactive database that will include standardised information on all hillforts in the UK and Eire and enable interrogation and analysis at a range of scales from an individual hillfort to the whole collection. The database will be linked to Google Earth/Maps so that the locations of hillforts can be seen within their landscape contexts. At the close of the project, the data file will be available for re-use in a variety of software. The information held will be a compilation of all existing sources, re-structured to provide maximum achievable consistency and the ability to search all hillforts, evaluating and comparing them on meaningful characteristics such as number and configuration of ramparts, ditches and entrances. Evaluation, analysis and interpretation will take place at local, regional and inter-regional scales and the outcomes will be a paper atlas of hillforts, where cartographic presentation will be matched by succinct analytical texts. These will include extensive discussion on the structuring of the data, including consideration of what is and is not a hillfort and why, together with the interpretation of analyses and patterns established at the different scales and visualised through a series of maps and plans. The results will feed significantly into discussions of regionality and how hillforts fit with other data and interpretations. This work will be mirrored by a critical re-assessment of the dating evidence for these sites, including isotopic and other scientific determinations, numismatic and artefactual data, and documentary sources: these monuments are used in both the first millennia BC and AD, and evaluation of the chronological range of these sites at a variety of scales will allow closer readings of patterns through time, to match the spatial focus highlighted above. The analysis of this set of sites across the whole of Britain and Ireland - something not previously-attempted - will generate new configurations of information on similarities and differences amongst sites that will challenge prevailing views. Hillforts are of great interest to a large range of audiences, sometimes just for their intrinsic archaeological value but often as part of wider landscape, historical and environmental interests. Further to encourage the breadth of this participation, the database will be configured as a hillfort-wiki, capable of accepting user-generated content so that additional text and images can be attached to any hillfort, separately from the core data generated by the project,