CH-CH-CH-CH-Changes: Improvements to our ADS-Easy and Oasis Images Services

 

 

Over the last few months, ADS beavers have been busy in the background making much needed updated and improvements to our electronic submissions systems. Over the last couple of years, we have listened to your comments, digested the constructive criticism in your emails, bought a job lot of earplugs for those exasperated phone calls and tried our best to address them. While we cannot remove all those requirements for metadata, or reduce the costs of deposition, what we have tried to improve is the process of deposition to make it as streamlined and seamless as possible.

Improvements for ADS-Easy

So what’s new? In re-evaluating the system, and listening to comments from users, we have been able to streamline the workflow with the removal of a whole step, which should help speed up the process of deposition. We have also added some great functionality that allows users to take advantage of the published thesauri by Historic England, RCHAMS and RCHAMW and search and select those terms directly from within ADS-easy. Following comments from depositors, we have updated the spreadsheet uploader for photographs and images so that it now uses the standard ADS raster metadata template available from the Guidelines for Depositors. Keen observers will notice that we have had to make some changes to the standard spreadsheet, so that it will work with the standard metadata template, so anyone using an old version of the template should take the opportunity to update to the newer version to save themselves time and effort later. As always, you can still keep a track of the cost of your deposition as you add and remove files from your deposit.

By far the greatest changes happens at the end of the deposition process where you can let us know any specific requirements for invoicing you require, and if you have received a costing for deposition already, you can add the ADS Tracking ID so we can tie things up at this end. As ever you can set out an embargo date for you deposition, let someone else know that you have deposited data, or simply leave a billet-doux for your favourite archivist. The changes do not stop there. Some users reported that it would be useful to have record of the costs of deposition for their records, alongside a receipt of the data uploaded, which we have gladly obliged. You can still see a summary of all the project metadata you have dutifully created.

Last, but not Least

All this, and the best is yet to come. After discussions with depositors, we have been able to expand the usage so you can now upload up to a 1000 files, with a maximum size of 100MB per file, and all geophysical surveys up to 50Ha. Yes that’s right, a 3x increase in the number of files we can accept, a 10x increase in the size of those files and a 5x increase in the quantity of geophysics we can receive, through the ADS-easy portal.  

We hope you like the changes as we have made them following comments from those within the ADS community, but if you have any observations, or notice any problems, then please let us know (help@archaeologydataservice.ac.uk).