Staff News
The last six months have seen a number of staff changes within the curatorial team. In July we said goodbye to Marcus Smith who headed to the University of Uppsala to continue his research in Viking archaeology. He was replaced by Stewart Waller who joined us full time in September. Stewart is a graduate of Bournemouth University and has recently been awarded a distinction in the MSc in Archaeological Information Systems at the University of York. He has spent the subsequent months working on a number of projects including work on the ARENA Portal.
Stewart Waller, who joined the curatorial team in September.
We are also looking forward to the imminent return of Jo Clarke who completes a year of voluntary work overseas in November, while Kieron Niven of the curatorial team is soon to start a job share between ADS and the Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC). The DPC is also based in York and functions as a central body for 28 member organisations, including the British Library, JISC and AHDS, to promote and provide guidance on digital preservation. Finally, Dr Julian Richards will become Professor Richards on 1st January 2005.
DIY with ArchSearch
In January 2004 ADS was invited to join a consortium of partners evaluating emerging standards for 'syndicating' content. This research, led by the University of Hull under the CREE Project - Contextual Resource Evaluation Environment Project - has given us the opportunity to investigate a number of novel technologies that are becoming more common as universities move towards the adoption of 'virtual learning environments' and 'institutional' portals.
The first part of this research saw the creation of a demonstration 'portlet' based on the JSR 168 standard. This portlet can be embedded within tools like the 'Uportal' portal software, allowing hosts to fashion their own interfaces to ArchSearch.
Of more immediate use, we have recently built a small 'code fragment' version of ArchSearch. This short piece of code can be carried on any web page allowing users to carry out simple queries in ArchSearch from any website. This means any website - such as a university departmental website - can have its own 'DIY' ArchSearch.
The ArchSearch box produced by the code fragment.
The code fragment allows web developers to include this search box within a web page. The facility allows all the main simple searches of ArchSearch including keywords, project titles, who, where and ID numbers. The code is available in XHTML 1.0 and HTML 4.0. Future developments may include tailored versions of the query box so that developers can build search boxes for specific ADS collections, excluding those that may not be relevant to their own users. In this way, any data depositor could configure a local interface to collections deposited with the ADS.
This and other code fragment tools such as our RSS 'news feeds' are available at:
http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/ADSTools/
