ArchSearch NEWS:
the online catalogue of the ADS
The curatorial team have been as busy as ever in the last few months, releasing an extraordinary range of new collections, and extending the existing catalogue. In addition to the delivery of collections, a number of new tools have been deployed, while recent changes and upgrades, that are in many respects invisible, have simplified our own working processes and will also improve access to collections.
Two very different artefact collections went live in June: the small finds catalogue of the National Museums and Galleries of Wales and a typological study of brooches in Roman Britain. The former includes some 140,000 individual finds from across Wales and includes the complete range of chance and planned small finds. The latter is much smaller but more intensive, based on the assemblage at the site of Richborough
May had a regional feel. We released the Trent Valley GeoArchaeology Bibliography and loaded into ArchSearch 13,500 records from the Yorkshire Dales National Park Authority's Historic Environment Record. The Park includes some of the best known and best preserved archaeology in the North of England. The new records link to Out of Oblivion, a project funded by the Heritage Lottery Fund.
Listeners to Today on Radio Four were treated to a synopsis of a new image gallery made available through the Society of Antiquaries of London in April. This archive contains over 2,000 images scanned from the Society's extensive library, and includes such famous lost artefacts as the Witham Bowl: now only known through drawings.
A place in the sun: photograph from the early monastic site of Dayr Mar Elian in Syria
Other collections launched include a photographic archive from Dayr Mar Elian in Syria, the digital archive of recent excavations at Fishbourne Roman Palace in Sussex, and a study of Nailsea Glassworks. The interactive archive of excavations at the early medieval monastic cemetery of Llandough provided a foretaste of our web-based GIS tools, allowing sophisticated map-based analysis of 800 individual burials. These are in addition to the launch of the English Heritage National Inventory and the Grey Literature Library reported elsewhere.
If that were not enough, we've also been working to realise a number of technical improvements in our systems. We've been preparing our offline archival collections for deposit in the new shared AHDS `deep storage' facility in King's College London and have continued to work on the shared AHDS procedures manuals while a new common cataloguing standard for collection description is being implemented for the AHDS collection search tools. We've also been working on an extensive review of the catalogue interface, due for release in the next few months.
ArchSearch News is brought to you by the ADS Curatorial Team: Jo Clarke, Jen Mitcham, Kieron Niven, Stewart Waller and Keith Westcott
ArchSearch is online at:
http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue
Lost treasure: a silver Anglo-Saxon bowl found in the River Witham in Lincolnshire, now only known through drawings.
