ADS provides online access to various services, including nearly 30,000 grey-literature fieldwork reports and over 700 research archives which are accessed via the ARCHSEARCH and ARCHIVES sections of the ADS website. Two specialised websites are “England’s Rock Art” and “Image bank”. As a member of DARIAH, ADS provides access to the Archaeological Records of Europe portal and also hosts the Transatlantic Archaeology Gateway.
Overview of Services
ADS follow the Open Archival Information System (OAIS) model for their data services for which they have held the Data Seal of Approval since 2010. A number of facilities are provided by their website to support their registered end users such as workbooks and email alerts.
The ARCHSEARCH service allows users to search archaeological records by key words, displays the locations of matching results on a map and also provides a more advanced search (form). Alternatively, the map can be used to define a rectangular area of interest (in England and Wales) for which all matching results are displayed. Over 1.3m records are available.
The ARCHIVES service enables end users to search journals and series, grey literature, project archives, bibliographies and theses by keyword and “where, what and when” style filters. Nearly 30,000 unpublished reports are available.
Extensive support is available to assist end users with the upload of their reports to both these services through the ADS-easy e-archiving system which fully implements data sharing through Linked Open Data (LOD).
Other services include ARENA, (Archaeological Records of Europe – Networked Access) which enables searching of archaeological resources from six European countries (Denmark, Great Britain, Norway, Iceland, Romania and Poland) by period, theme and place.
Transatlantic Archaeology Gateway (TAG) project has developed tools for transatlantic cross-searching and semantic interoperability between the ADS digital repository and tDAR, the repository of Arizona State University.
Overview of ADS Data Services
ADS Resources Online – presentation given at CAA, Paris 2014. (PDF 2.96MB)
Training Guide