Please help us by completing the short BIAB survey

BIAB is moving from the CBA to ADS in 2016. The idea is to integrate it with other ADS Library resources like the Library of Unpublished Fieldwork Reports (aka the Grey Literature Library).

As a first step in this change we would like to establish who is using BIAB in its current form and which other bibliographic tools the historic environment community are using in their research.

Please complete the survey – which is no more than 10 questions – in order to help us identify the current and potential users of BIAB.

The British and Irish Archaeological Bibliography (BIAB) is a free service, providing the most comprehensive database of bibliographic records covering literature pertaining to the archaeology of Britain and Ireland, spanning 900,000 years of human history from the Palaeolithic to contemporary society, and reporting on a range of methods and approaches. Entries come from a variety of sources including published books, journals, society newsletters, unpublished development control excavation reports (‘grey literature’) and postgraduate theses. BIAB is currently supported by a number of national archaeological bodies and published by the CBA.

Up until now BIAB has been updated manually by a small team of freelance abstractors and while both ADS and CBA remain convinced that the discipline needs what BIAB can offer, the service needs to be re-engineered to position it more as a modern 21st-century resource discovery aid and as a metadata service which provides quality information to enhance and link together other datasets.

So when OASIS is redeveloped in the next year or so it will be fully integrated with the new version of BIAB and the excavation reports which currently go into the Grey Literature LIbrary will become entries in BIAB instead. There is also the hope that other entries in BIAB will link out to the location of  the publication if it is available online.

The survey is available until Sunday 23rd August, should take under 5 minutes and your response will be anonymised.

If you have any questions about this, or the survey in general, please contact the ADS via Jo Gilham on jo.gilham@york.ac.uk or 01904 323937.