Archaeology Data Service: Guides to Best Practice

Katie Green’s seminar last Tuesday gave an insight into the work of the Archaeology Data Service (ADS), and emphasised the importance of best practice when creating, depositing and preserving digital data.

In line with this issue, we thought we’d share ADS’s Guidelines for Depositors, which provides guidance on how to correctly prepare data and compile metadata specifically for deposition with ADS, as well as describing the ways in which data can be deposited with ADS. The Guidelines for Depositors are available to download as a PDF here.

Other resources for the use of potential depositors include a series of Guides to Good Practice. The Guides to Good Practice address the preservation of data resulting from discipline specific archaeological data collection, processing and analysis techniques such as: aerial, geophysical and marine survey; laser scanning; close-range photogrammetry; Geographical Information Systems (GIS); Computer-Aided Design (CAD); and virtual reality. The scope of the Guides to Good Practice not only includes the United Kingdom and Europe, but also North and South America, and other parts of the world. The Guides to Good Practice complement the ADS Guidelines for Depositors and provide more detailed information on specific data types.

Katie also mentioned ADS’s affiliation with the open source journal, Internet Archaeology, which is hosted by the Department of Archaeology at the University of York and digitally archived by the ADS. The new issue of the journal has opened with the publication of ‘Understanding Archaeological Authority in a Digital Context’ by Lorna-Jane Richardson:

http://dx.doi.org/10.11141/ia.38.1

This article considers the issues of archaeological authority, expertise and organisational reputation in the UK from an online perspective, and questions whether the participatory promise of social media technologies can, and should, challenge archaeological authority. It explores how these issues are approached and mediated online, the issues of digital literacy for audience reception, and the approaches used by archaeological organisations to address the challenges of undertaking digital public archaeology projects whilst maintaining archaeological rigour and the visible performance of expertise.

It discusses how the concepts of archaeological authority and expertise are demonstrated and practised online, using data from my doctoral research, undertaken from 2011 to 2013. This article questions if the presence of websites dedicated to the promulgation of alternative archaeologies on the Internet can present challenges for the performance of archaeological expertise online, and how organisations monitor and respond to alternative archaeological interpretations and news stories. This research was funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and Open Access to this article was also provided by the AHRC.

Second Seminar for Medieval Studies in the Digital Age Series to be Presented by Dr Katie Green

The second seminar in the Medieval Studies in the Digital Age Seminar and Workshop Series at Leeds will be with Dr Katie Green, a seminar entitled ‘Data Management, Digital Preservation and the Archaeology Data Service’ on Tuesday 2 December 2014.

Dr Katie Green is the Communications and Access Manager at the Archaeology Data Service (ADS), University of York, UK. The ADS is a specialised digital repository for archaeological data and supports research, learning and teaching with freely available, high quality and dependable digital resources. It does this by preserving digital data in the long term and by promoting good practice in the use of digital data in archaeology. 

Archaeology is in a special position in that much of the creation of its data results from destruction of primary evidence. Over the years, archaeologists have amassed a vast collection of fieldwork data archives, a significant proportion of which remain unpublished. Access to data, even those which are published, is often difficult or inconvenient at best. The ADS is building an integrated online catalogue to its collections, and a gateway to other collections, which will be available over the Internet.

The ADS was founded by a consortium comprising the Council for British Archaeology with the Universities of Birmingham, Bradford, Glasgow, Kent at Canterbury, Leicester, Newcastle, Oxford and York. The ADS is guided by an advisory committee consisting of representatives from all sectors of the discipline.

Dr Green’s seminar will introduce the ADS preservation strategy before presenting some of its key medieval resources. Read more about the seminar here.

The seminar will take place at the Le Patourel Room, 4.06, Parkinson Building, University of Leeds and start with tea and coffee at 5:30 pm. All of our events are free of charge and everyone is welcome but spaces will be limited so we kindly ask you to register via Eventbrite.

You can read a research paper, which uses the ADS as a case study, online:

‘The Use of PDF/A in Digital Archives: A Case Study from Archaeology’ by Tim N. L. Evans and Ray H. Moore, in International Journal of Digital Curation, 9:2 (2014), 123-138