One of the things that engaging with the OASIS system can do is provide a quick easy and cost free means of HERs linking from their records to the relevant reports. Some HERs currently put this to good use and you can see examples in the Heritage Gateway of HERs, like Suffolk and Cambridgeshire, providing a really rich resource to the user. So if you are not already doing it, how do you go about doing this linking?

Once digital reports attached to OASIS records are transferred to the ADS Library of Unpublished Fieldwork Reports, you may want to create links to them from your website or HER record, whether they are in the Heritage gatway or not. This can be achieved in a number of ways. The most reliable way of creating a link would be to use the Digital Object Identifier (doi) which has been allocated to each report. A doi is a persistent identifier which you can use to consistently and accurately reference digital objects and/or content. The good thing about these identifiers is that they will never change, so even if the url of a report changes, the doi will still resolve to the right place.

Each report in the Grey Literature Library should have unique DOI in the sidebar under ‘Resource identifiers’. This DOI will look a little like this ‘doi:10.5284/1008885’ (though the number at the end of this string will vary for each report). In order to turn this doi into a link, you simply need to prefix it with ‘http://dx.doi.org/’ as shown below:

http://dx.doi.org/10.5284/1008885

However, for many of you, your preferred option for linking to grey literature reports may be to use the OASIS ID. If you already store the OASIS ID in your databases the creation of links would be relatively straightforward. Simply append the full OASIS ID of the report you wish to link to the end of the following url: http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/greylit/query.cfm?assoc_id=

for example:

http://archaeologydataservice.ac.uk/archives/view/greylit/query.cfm?assoc_id=suffolkc1-116445

Unfortunately, not all OASIS records will have a grey literature report in the library. This may be because a report wasn’t uploaded, or because we do not have permission to make the report available. For those records that don’t have a corresponding report in the library, the above link will just resolve to a ‘No records found’ page.

So by including this information in your HER record and exposing that online the links to the reports will appear…. just like that!