The first half of 2020 has been an interesting one for sure. We’ve been working from home with our partners, children, and kettles as coworkers and we’ve begun to look at how information is presented on our website.
You may or may not have come to our site to find out guidance on depositing data. In that quest, you may have found a document/guide that was spread across several webpages, with no images, an over eager table of contents, and a reminder it was written in 2015. Well, you’ll be happy to know, that it’s gotten a bit of a face lift.
So without further ado, allow me to reintroduce yourself to our Guidelines for Depositors.
Our main purpose with our guidelines is to produce a concise overview of who the ADS is and why you should deposit with us (*cough* CoreTrustSeal repository *cough*) along with providing information on what we accept and how you can deposit with us.
We’ve also added a few new things.
These Guidelines are heavily linked to other areas of our website to help people find pages easier as well as allowing those who want to learn more about a particular topic the opportunity (because who wouldn’t want to read the ADS Collections Policy in detail).
The data types we accept are listed as well as the data formats and metadata requirements. Plus we’ve added a bit to explain what the different data types with the help of our Guides to Good Practice.
Additionally, the ways to deposit with us are shown along with an explanation for costs associated with deposition.
We also felt that this would be a great opportunity to clarify some of the more confusing bits, like what is data vs metadata? Why is metadata need? How do you prepare data for deposit?
Finally, we created a new section: Interfaces. This section explains all about our different interface options, standard and custom. We felt that we were missing a good explanation as to how data deposited with us can be disseminated, from searchable database to interactive models and maps.
We hope that you’ll enjoy the update. We’d love to hear your feed back on these changes so please let us know in the survey below!
https://york.qualtrics.com/jfe/form/SV_8CvpQBoqwqFtWaF (now closed)
Featured image Illustration credit: Ainsley Seago.
