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CATS WEEK – Changes at the ADS

Once a year here at the ADS we let all of our cats free for a week into the world. There they do whatever fills their little hearts with joy. Playing with mice, relaxing in the warmth of monitors, and making changes to facilitate better archival of archaeological data. You know, normal cat behaviour.

This year’s CATS (curatorial and technical staff) week has been a productive one. We’ve identified issues to our work flow and come up with potential solutions. New technology such as Leaflet and IIIF were explored to see how they might improve the dissemination of archives. All of the formats we accept have been reevaluated so we can keep on track of those that might be at risk of obsolesces.

Overall its been a good week for us, but you may be wondering what changes it will do for you?

At the moment, nothing. We only just finished you see, we have to have time to act on all of our blue sky dreams, but coming up you should see:

  • A quicker turn around on the archival process from ingest to dissemination
  • Improvements to the dissemination and layout of archives
  • Creation of new tools to improve workflows
  • More transparency on why we accept the data formats that we do
  • Further investigation into the creation of an ADS’ Preservation Action Registry to improve documentation of data preservation activities

That’s all for now. It’s been an exciting week and we hope you’ll love the changes as much as we do!

CAT out.