The Grey Literature Library is one of the ADS's most popular resources and one that is of massive research value. The library is constantly growing, with over 1900 reports submitted in the first quarter of 2014. Feedback from the archaeological community makes it clear that the hosting of openly accessible digital grey literature is a boon. However, one of the questions we are most commonly asked is "why does it take so long for a report uploaded to OASIS to make its way into the library?" Here's an insight into what's going on behind the scenes ...more.

We all know that the historic environment sector has undergone a great degree of upheaval over the last few years as a result of the recession-busting moves by both central and local government and, perhaps even more importantly, the slump in building activity. At the same time colleagues in the sector are coming to rely more and more on technological solutions to help provide a high quality archaeological information to the public. It is therefore heartening to be able to announce an investment by English Heritage in OASIS to consider a project to redevelop the system to better meet the needs of the historic environment community it endeavours to serve ....more.

To recognise the effort that authors make in order to deposit digital data and to get academic credit for that effort, Internet Archaeology (IA) and the ADS have established an open access data paper series. 'Data papers' maximise a dataset's re-use potential and help to improve the preservation and the publication of data and are a valuable addition to the advancement of archaeological research. However IA and ADS have now taken the concept a little further. In order to identify the content and provide a persistent link to its location on the Internet, each data paper in IA and the corresponding archive in ADS are assigned unique DOIs ....more.

With the SENESCHAL project finally wrapped up, we thought it would be good to do a final post on how we implemented the SENESCHAL vocabularies into our systems. This follows on from my previous post, SENESCHAL Vocabularies: value to the ADS, which gives more background into the project in general. That post also lays out the original vision and a mock-up for the integration of the SENESCHAL vocabularies into our Collections Management System (CMS), which we can now safely say has been fully realised ....more.

While rationalising old and orphaned files on the ADS servers, ADS's Michael Charno stumbled upon an old index.html file for a previous version of the website. Similar to discovering a long forgotten photograph in the attic, this led Michael down the meandering path of memory lane. However unlike a photograph, reconstructing the look and feel of a web page requires some fiddling to correctly associate the style sheets and any server side includes ....more.