The ADS in partnership
Mike Rains
York Archaeological Trust
The tenth anniversary of the establishment of the Archaeology Data Service which we are happy to celebrate this year, coincides roughly with a couple of other tenth anniversaries close to my own heart. In October 2006 it will be ten years since I moved from the Scottish Urban Archaeological Trust in Perth to York Archaeological Trust (YAT). And summer 2006 saw the tenth season of the Silchester Town Life Project field school based at the University of Reading. I mention these anniversaries because it is over this ten year period that my own approach to archaeological data, its creation, use and preservation, has developed and evolved. This has happened largely within the framework of the Integrated Archaeological Database (IADB). Although the origins of the IADB lie further back, it is in the last ten years that it's significant development has taken place, driven largely by the requirements of YAT and Silchester. Some of the problems and issues thrown up along the way serve to highlight the importance of the ADS.
In packing up for a forthcoming change of premises by YAT, a large number of 5.25 inch floppy disks have come to light, many up to 20 years old, others unlabelled and so of unknown age. (For the aging techies out there, they include some CP/M formatted Perfect Writer disks created on a Wren computer, but not as yet any Amstrad 3 inch disks!). I know we all have horror stories like this, but the point is that the people who carefully created these disks and safely stored them away in dusty cupboards probably thought that they were creating a valuable archive for the future. In fact the experience of YAT is that the most accessible and usable parts of its collection of digital records, dating back over 25 years, are those which have never been archived in the traditional sense. For example, finds records from the excavations at Coppergate, York, created (on punched cards!) in the mid 1970s, are still instantly accessible through the IADB because they have always remained part of an ever growing live database which has been migrated many times from old to new hardware and software but has always remained live. In contrast, digital context data from the same period was archived to floppy disks or magnetic tape and stored away without any provision for future curation - it is now almost all lost, inaccessible or unusable. Unfortunately, I suspect there are still many people out there putting disks in boxes under beds.
While this, no doubt, familiar, cautionary tale points up the need for the ADS, recent developments of the IADB, particularly in connection with the Silchester project, perhaps illustrate some of the key issues which need to be addressed by the ADS, IADB and others over the next ten years. Over recent years, the IADB has developed into a prototype virtual research environment for archaeology and a web report publication tool. The various user interfaces are now such an integral part of the archaeological resource which the IADB represents, that simple archiving of the underlying relational database is no longer an adequate answer to the long term preservation of the resource. Furthermore, as the IADB is a live and developing system, both in terms of the database content and the user interface, itself the subject of ongoing research and development, traditional approaches to database archiving are not appropriate. The ADS, Internet Archaeology and the Silchester Town Life project are currently beginning to address these issues through the LEAP project, but there is much work still to be done.
Although representing only a small part of its work, the aspects touched on here highlight just how important to archaeology the ADS has been over the past ten years, and will be into the future. As a body recognised and respected across the sector, the ADS has been able to take a broad view of the way ahead for archaeological data, and has defined and encouraged best practice throughout the field. Long may it continue!
York Archaeological Trust: http:// www.yorkarchaeology.co.uk
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