All resources archived with the ADS are Open Access, and delivered through our website to facilitate reuse by the heritage sector and wider community.

The ADS is committed to recording and presenting the (re)use of data deposited with us. Every object (i.e. file) download is recoded via Matomo, formerly Piwik, a free and open source web analytics application. We only store the download action itself (the file identifier and date of download), and do not record or keep the IP address the download request came from.

Each Archive has a designated page called ‘Usage Statistics’ where numbers of Downloads can be viewed and accessed, for an example see the page for the Rural Settlement of Roman Britain archive.

Each Journal, Monograph or Unpublished Report Series has a similar feature. In these cases it is a tab called ‘Statistics’ available from the main series page in the Library. You can see an on this series page for the journal Archaeologia Aeliana.

The ADS Library has an overarching Statistics page which aggregates all downloads of Journals/Monographs and Unpublished Reports. Users may be interested in general trends, which are reported and discussed every year in the ADS Annual Report. A general picture of ALL of the downloads by month and year can be viewed on our Downloads from ADS page.

Where possible, the ADS endeavor to record where an archive or object has been used and cited in another piece of work. This is currently as an ‘Associated Collection’ on the relevant Metadata page. A more advanced system of dynamic and programmatic citation capture is currently being planned via Digital Object Identifiers and resources such as the Crossref Event Data API. This system should allow more accurate recording of use and citation in our metadata schema.  We also endeavour to record high-profile or interesting reuse of data on the Case Studies page.