thanks warren,and also jason for their comments.
this problem was actually picked up when plugging data into a piece of software
called visual nature studio, which i believe does need a datum so perhaps does
make use of the .prj file parameters. certainly when we corrected the value the
data
Hello Rachel,
Actually shapefiles don't contain any coordinate system or datum
information. They just store dumb number coordinates which have no intrinsic
context. In the current versions of ArcGIS, a projection file (.prj) is
used, with the same name as the shapefile set, to define the
