Lincs to the Past

Background

In August 2009, Lincolnshire County Council launched - Cultural Collections (http://culturalcollections.lincolnshire.gov.uk), which was a joint search engine for library, museum and archive online information.

Since then the County Council have been looking to enhance this offer and significantly increase the number of images of cultural items (e.g. archive documents, maps, photographs) online and develop associated learning and exhibition packages. In August 2010 there were over 5,000 images available in digital format on the Cultural Collections website. Lincs to the Past has well over 500,000 images!

Lincs to the Past

• Searching for items is quick and easy with records, photographs and actual objects being shown as high quality images.
• You can buy copies of images online
• Lincs to the Past is aimed at both dedicated researchers and casual browsers
• There is a timeline of available records going all the way back over thousands of years
• You can search your family history or find out about the village where you live
• You can save your searches, images, records in your own special archive
• You can access items not currently on public display
• Experienced staff have provided lots of interpretation to make the content come alive
• There are a wide range of learning resources and online exhibitions, which will keep being updated
• You can donate to the service to help with future developments
• You can add tags and comments to the records
• You can receive updates as and when new records are added

Key content

There is a wealth of family and social history records, such as parish registers, probate inventories and regimental rolls; images of objects from within our Heritage collections, such as arms and armour, textiles and watches; and, pictures of Lincolnshire places as well as historic maps. The content has been chosen to meet the needs of a diverse audience, including casual browsers, family/local historians, learning providers and academics.

Lincs to the Past will also pull in Lincolnshire County Council’s Historic Environment Record (HER) data - information on all known archaeology in the County of Lincolnshire. The record is also sometimes called the Sites and Monuments Record (SMR). It records the archaeology from the earliest Stone Age (the Palaeolithic, from about 500,000 years ago) to almost the present day.

And just so you know…

Lincs to the Past (and the infrastructure behind it) has been built to last. It’s designed to allow for future expansion and/or changes.

Lincs to the Past will aid the development of new and innovative partnerships and volunteer engagement - get in touch with us if you want to work together.