The Archaeology Data Service (ADS) is situated in the Department of Archaeology at the University of York in the UK and is funded partly by the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and partly by project-based funding drawn from academia, the European Union, National and Local Government archaeology services and commercial archaeology. The core objective of the ADS is to support research, learning and teaching with high quality and dependable digital resources. It does this by preserving digital data in the long term, and by promoting and disseminating a broad range of data in archaeology. The ADS promotes good practice in the use of digital data in archaeology, it provides technical advice to the research community, and supports the deployment of digital technologies. It was awarded the Data Seal of Approval in 2010.
The ADS has been involved in a number of European-funded research and development projects since 2001. These have included a co-ordinating role in ARENA (Archaeological Records of Europe Networked Access) to develop a cross-search European portal, completed in 2004 (http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/arena/), and subsequently taken forward as ARENA2 (http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/research/arena2) within the ESFRI DARIAH infrastructure project: http://www.dariah.eu/: . The ADS is also a partner in the Culture2007 programme ACE (Archaeology in Contemporary Europe) project: http://www.ace-archaeology.eu/.
Our role in ARIADNE is sharing the scientific coordination with PIN and leading the workpackage on Transnational Access, as well as participating in most of the other areas of activity. ADS is also currently the UK archaeology aggregator for Europeana within CARARE (http://www.carare.eu/) and a partner in the forthcoming LoCloud Europeana project both funded via the European Commission’s ICT Policy Support Programme.
Website: Archaeology Data Service