It’s with great regret that at the end of February 2015 we said goodbye to Catherine Hardman, ADS Deputy Director and Collections Development Manager. Catherine had been with us for over 13 years, having joined ADS from working on the Extensive Urban Survey project for Cumbria County Council. A lot has changed during that period, but some things are still the same. One of Catherine’s first duties was to give a presentation on OASIS at the 2002 Computer Applications in Archaeology conference in Heraklion in Crete. One of her last roles has been to oversee the HERALD User Needs survey, which will inform the future development of the OASIS online recording form.
During that period OASIS has become the cornerstone of heritage information strategy in England, and it has played a key role in creating a key online resource for British Archaeology. When Catherine joined ADS there were no unpublished fieldwork reports in the grey literature library; as she leaves us the library has just exceeded the 30,000 report threshold, each with a permanent Digital Object Identifier, and excellent metadata. We wish Catherine good luck in her new job with the Parliamentary Archives, and hope she is as successful sorting out the Government’s digital data as she has been with Archaeology. In the meantime we are pleased to welcome Louisa Matthews, who takes over oversight of OASIS, and Collections Development.
Louisa’s first brush with archaeology was in 1997 with the University of York training excavation at Castell Henllys in Pembrokeshire. After graduating from the University of Sheffield with a BSc in Archaeological Science in 2001, Louisa worked briefly as a site assistant in Cambridgeshire, before getting her first job in local government at Warwickshire County Council in 2002, where she discovered an interest in working with databases and GIS. Louisa went on to work for South Yorkshire Archaeology Service in 2003 as Assistant Archaeologist with responsibility for the Sites and Monuments Record (SMR) and assisting in the production of the service publication, Archaeology in South Yorkshire. In 2008 Louisa took a career break to go back to University, studying for an MSc in Environmental Archaeology and Palaeoeconomy, again at the University of Sheffield. In 2010, Louisa took up the post of Historic Environment Record Officer at North Yorkshire County Council where she worked on implementing and updating the Historic Environment Record enhancement plan.
At ADS Louisa will be responsible for managing our expert team of digital archivists, and developing our collections. Louisa will therefore be the main point of contact for depositors wishing to deposit with the ADS.
