Happy 10th Birthday ADS!
Keith May
Archaeologist - digital strategic information, English Heritage
For some reason, probably to do with belonging to organisations with a national coverage, a fair number of my memories involving ADS over the last ten years feature trains or train related journeys.
I remember the first time I ever heard of the Archaeology Data Service I was on a train journey between London and the English Heritage, Fort Cumberland office in Portsmouth. Although I can't recall the precise words that my boss at the time, Tim Williams, used to describe the setting up of the ADS, I can remember responding, 'That's great, it's just what we need!' Well I feel looking back now over ten years that the optimistic endorsement has not been proved wrong.
One of my favourite recollections is of the day I travelled to Essex for a meeting about a particular digital publication. I met Damian Robinson on the train from London and we enjoyed catching up with each others news before being told by the train conductor that the train would be terminating only about half-way to our destination. After disembarking rather apprehensively from the train there then followed a most bizarre bus journey through what seemed like a large proportion of the Essex countryside before we arrived in Braintree to find the meeting about half-way through. Luckily Damian and I had had plenty of time to actually agree a good plan for what we thought the best approach to the project's digital dissemination and archiving would be, so the outcome of the meeting perhaps ultimately benefited, despite our rather belated, disgruntled and slightly disorientated late arrival.
Over the years the same pattern of working closely - and perhaps to a considerable degree behind to scenes - has continued and proved very fruitful for both organisations.
In amongst the numerous trips by myself and ADS staff up and down between York and London, and also to many other locations within England and other countries, there have been a wealth of co-operative projects over the last 10 years.
In the early days perhaps the most significant was 'Strategies for Digital Data' which resulted in the report on the national survey of digital data in the UK and set an agenda for much of what has been tackled and achieved in the last ten years. It may well be that a review of these strategies and their outcomes would be timely again soon.
Probably one of the most ground-breaking projects - although now it seems much more commonplace - was DAPPER (Digital Archiving Pilot Project - Excavation Recording) which was the first EH funded project where ADS undertook to assess,develop and recommend the best approaches for digital archiving and dissemination of archaeological excavation results.
With such good foundations in place, since then we have successfully increased the scale, complexity and quality of the types of archaeological material that ADS have been able to archive and disseminate. The latest ongoing project is Big Data which, to a degree, takes the methodology piloted by DAPPER but seeks to push the boundaries further and address the issues posed by large-scale remote sensing data available from airborne and terrestrial laser-scanning along with marine geophysical data. It is in work such as this that I really appreciate just how much the ADS is at the cutting edge of digital archiving. Having recently attended an e-science workshop at Imperial College, one of the information science based lead speakers responded to my question about linking e-science with the humanities by saying "you should talk to the archaeologists" which I have to admit made me smile and consider that at least we must be making some progress along the right lines.Of course there is plenty more to be done. The OASIS system for reporting archaeological investigations online has now been running successfully for two years and is continuing to grow, both in terms of support for the process and the amount of information being provided. It is crucial that we can continue to consolidate and build on this work together across national, regional and local boundaries to agree common standards and protocols for interoperability in the historic environment.
All these examples, along with others, are important aspects in EH's strategy for defining the digital end products of the archaeological process, which requires that digital information should be generated and maintained in ways that best enable use for all the expected means of dissemination.
Unfortunately I will not be able to attend on the day of the actual ADS birthday party. Once again I will be on another train journey - although this time I plan to be in the Ukraine and I confess it is entirely pleasure rather than business. But I send my best wishes and I look forward to the next ten years of equally exciting, interesting and challenging opportunities and innovations for working with the ADS.
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