Industrial History Online (IHO) is an on line database that is designed to act as a repository for contributors knowledge and photographs of industrial sites, artefacts and processes and to make this information is available the public and other IHO Contributors. The key objectives being too:-
INDUSTRIAL History Online (IHO) is a fully searchable database with two main purposes. It is archival - to provide a county-wide record of industrial sites, pre-Roman to current, both visible and no longer visible, comprising people’s knowledge, documents, photographs and audio and video recordings. It is a source of information for anyone wishing to discover more about the county’s rich industrial heritage and the often surprising range and geographical extent of our industries.
Ref TO GLIAS
and members of the collaboration via a fully searchable web site, and it is hoped, that in time, this will become an invaluable resource to everyone researching the Industrial Heritage. [1]
The project was originally conceived by Robert Vickers in 2011 and based of work previously under taken by the Greater London Industrial Archaeology Society. [2] The initial version of the web site was released in late 2014 and data entry commence in early 2015. As of December 2020 a small but committed group of volunteers have added some 8,200 site records and 3,200 images that cover Yorkshire and .
The following notes are intended to provide a general Introduction to IHO and guidance on how to:-
Whilst the database was originally developed to record industries and heritage sites within Yorkshire, it is not limited to Yorkshire and members are free to enter information on any sites in the UK that they have knowledge of. The only limitation is that not all the County databases are currently enabled. (See Appendix C for more details) If you wish to add records in a County for which the database has not been enabled please contact the IHO Administrator.
It is important to stress that IHO is not intended to replace web sites s such as those maintained by Historic England (HE) or the Historic Environment Records (HERs) but to augment these by providing additional data on sites in these records and on sites that are not currently recorded elsewhere.
It is hoped that members will provided descriptions of any manufacturing processes, machinery, buildings or services industries, that they were personally involved with. Information on industrial process is vital to understanding how sites functioned and as such processes become more complex the Industrial Heritage community risks losing the knowledge and hence the ability to understand sites.
IHO seeks to maintain the highest standards and all records are Moderated before being made available on the Public Pages. This means that all entries are reviewed for obvious errors, however Given the wide variety of sites it is not possible for the Moderators to check all the details just spelling, grammar and other obvious errors.
YAHS, Affiliated Societies and the Individual Contributors, however, make no warranty whatsoever as to its accuracy or completeness. Further, if any individual or organisation believes that any Material is incorrectly attributed or credited please contact us on:- support.iho@yahs.org.uk and the Material will either be removed or the acknowledgement will be corrected.
Note on Copyright
Data extracted from IHO must not be used for commercial purposes without the prior written approval of the Copyright Holder(s).
IHO uses the Creative Commons Attribution - Non Commercial - Share Alike 4.0 Licence Agreement (subsequently referred to as CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0). This Licence Agreement allows others to use the Material on IHO for Non Commercial purposes in return for attribution. The material cannot however be used for Commercial purposes. If anyone wishes to use the material for Commercial purposes they need to apply to the Copyright Holder for permission and the Copyright Holder may charge a fee for granting such permission.IHO is an open source web based application written in HTML, PHP, JavaScript and CSS. The database MYSQL whilst GoogleMaps are used for the mapping functions. The software is provided under the GNU open source licence agreement which allows users to copy and develop the software for none-commercial purposes.
The Software is optimised for use on Firefox and Google Chrome and although it has been tested on the other major search engines it is possible some differences may occur when using these. At present the software is intended for use on a PC, Laptop or Tablet. Work is on going to enable it to run on other web enabled devices.
The database architecture has been designed to allow the software to be easily expandable to include other data types should this be required. The data for the sites in each County is stored in a separate database table which is identified using a unique three letter code for each county. Thus North Yorkshire is identified by NYK, South Yorkshire by SYK and so on. Other data such as photographs and images etc are stored in separate tables which are identified by the appropriate three letter county code followed by descriptor for the type of data being held. Thus images for North Yorkshire are held in the table NYKImages. Individual image files are however not held in the database tables but are held in a separate directory with only the path being held in the table. Site referencing within the software is principally by the internally generated database ID. However as these ID's could on occasions be confusing to users the software also generates a unique Site Identification Number comprising of the the County Code followed by a 5 digit number. This provides for 99,999 sites to be entered for each of the four Yorkshire Counties, ie 400,000 sites in total.
IHO has adopted a broad definition as to what constitutes our Industrial Heritage and this encompasses:-
In all rural areas many families undertook small scale manufacturing alongside agriculture. Whilst some of the best known examples of this are the domestic spinning and weaving in the Pennine dales, other significant rural industries across Yorkshire included the Wensleydale and Swaledale knitters and the manufacture of leather goods. Whilst many of these industries have left few physical remains where it is possible to associate such industries with specific farms or other buildings this should be recorded as it will greatly enhance our knowledge of the extent such industries.
After considerable debate it has been decided that the following types of site should be excluded, principally because they are well covered elsewhere:-
There are no time limits on the dates of the industries that should be included in the data base and pre Roman sites are considered to be just as important and those from the 19th & 20th Century. We would however caution care when recording modern industrial sites that are still active and in these cases only iconic sites should be included.
The following rules are now enforced on New Passwords in the change password module. All old passwords, well the 1/2 dozen I have checked still work OK. Passwords must have a minimum of 10 characters and must include 1 uppercase and 1 lowercase letter and 1 number also a number of special characters are allowed but not required There is 2 stage checking. Javascript is used to do client-side checking but as this is relatively easy to get around it is then repeated server-side using PHP I have also added code that allows special characters to be inserted into SQL without generating errors. I have checked and the code is consistent between the change password and login modules. So the following is a valid password Wander1234#
R Vickers, Creating an Industrial History Database for Yorkshire, YAJ Vol 85, 2013 213-14
[2]
R Vickers, J Suter, Recording and Communicating Yorkshire’s Industrial Heritage, YAJ, Vol xx,