| ADS ONLINE - ISSUE 12 - From Discovery to Delivery - ISSN 1368-0560 | Front Page | Contents |
This summer witnessed the launch of the 'next generation' system for interfacing with ADS data collections. ArchSearch II involved a complete hardware and software upgrade. Data and the tools which serve it across the Internet to users are now distributed over a group of information servers with a powerful Sun E250 computer joining our existing equipment. An enterprise (large business) level software platform of an Oracle 8i database and Macromedia's ColdFusion (middleware that mediates between database and web server) has allowed the provision of semantically enhanced ways to interrogate resources held by the ADS. All this 'behind the scenes' work has necessarily been accompanied by an overhaul of the interface and associated user support systems into our current house style. This section of the ADS News looks at some of the new tools now available.
The new basic search interface (shown below) allows simple queries or 'builder' searches through the continued refinement of your results set. The Search by resource option allows users to specify which collections they wish to search, for example, a researcher might only be interested in sites covered by the Northumberland Sites and Monuments Record. An enhanced click on Map search now allows keywords to be specified, for example, users can now specify 'Roman' in a defined geographical area. Thus for the first time those most important of archaeological attributes, space and time, can be brought together.
Delivery, the other side of resource discovery has also been upgraded. Users still get the traditional ArchSearch format of brief records with hot links to more detailed information, as shown above.
Alternatively, results of interest can be selected and displayed in tabular form (see below).The user can also control which fields will be displayed. In the original version of ArchSearch it was only ever possible to view one record at a time, and it was only possible to view all the fields at once for any given record.
In addition to viewing records on a table, it is also now possible to create small files for import into local desktop applications. So, a researcher can find the records that interest them and then import them into their own systems. This new development was introduced specifically in response to user consultation when the system was being designed.
These are just some of the enhancements now available to users of ArchSearch. If you haven't used d ArchSearch II recently then it will be worth taking some time to find out about other recent innovations: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/.
ArchSearch News is brought to you by the ADS technical team: Tony Austin, Keith Westcott and Jo Clarke (collections@ads.ahds.ac.uk)
Problems viewing this page?
Here's a list of known or recurring problems and how to fix them
© ADS 1996-2012 Edited by
William Kilbride, email
Monday, 08 August 2005
Cite only: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/newsletter/issue12/archsearch.html for this page