Just give me the damn data
For most people doing basic starting level historical/archaeological research in the UK the search starts at Heritage Gateway - This website, probably designed for Netscape Navigator and Internet Explorer 6 is gloriously, terribly awful. Probably some usual Government IT project that cost many million, it in turn queries the Historic Environment Records (sometimes referred to as Sites and Monuments Records) which are held by County Council and District Councils in the UK. It queries all of them, even when you don't need that and returns links through to another awful service that lists records that have no sorting or reason and may number in the many hundreds for you to click through. This will cover everything from Stonehenge to a single field find from back in the early 90s.
As its currently 7years into winter and its been raining in the UK for about 6 of those, I'm trying to do some research for sites to investigate further should it eventually stop raining and dry out. However, right now Heritage Gateway queries almost all of the Counties, but gives a server error for Worcestershire - this has persisted over 24hrs... In my day job if a server is down for that long someone (probably me) is getting fired, but that’s local government for you.
So, site doesn’t work. Has a UI from the dawn of the internet, makes narrowing down searches hard or impossible and seems to be barely maintained. Surely the solution is obvious and cheaper... just upload all the data to S3 (other datastores are available), stick a CloudFront (other CDNs etc) end on it if you feel posh and let me (and others) download it and process it as they see fit. I'm no coder but I can probably sort a data dump and do useful thing to it. Given a real coder and/or system guy that hasn’t transitioned to management (like I have) combined with AI and I'd love to see what people could come up with. Modern beautiful data. Keep the 90's era frontend if you must.
This is for data of course that is already online in some form... now lets also consider what isn't. For me personally this is largely a dataset from 2001 or there about regarding Defence buildings in Worcestershire. I can't even find where its held. The level of gatekeeping for non academics means that even if I hazard a guess, there is no guarantee I'll be allowed to access it. This is data that’s stored and maintained in part from local taxes I pay. Again, let me see the data. The raw scans, AI and sheer bloody mindedness will at least help people refer back to something. In short, just give me the damn data!