Collection Highlights

Here colleagues and collaborators present their personal views on some favourite ADS resources

The Grey Literature Library

Catherine Hardman

Catherine Hardman,
ADS Collections Development Manager





We first established the Library of Unpublished Fieldwork Reports, or as it is colloquially known, the Grey Literature Library (GLL) back in 2003 as a proof of concept idea, borrowing eight grey literature reports from Worcestershire Historic Environment Record to seed the collection, and to show that we could make links from HER/NMR indices to the associated full report. We hoped that this would show the enormous opportunities afforded by the then nascent OASIS system to act as a quick and easy way to create indices and link resources together.

The GLL harvests metadata from other resources, primarily OASIS records but also other resources hosted by the ADS such as reports produced under the Aggregate Levy Sustainability Fund or those produced as part of the works undertaken on the Channel Tunnel Rail Link. The metadata is then reused and made available to search within the GLL but is based on the usual ADS site based searches, where, what and when; a simple but powerful way of reaching results.

From these humble beginnings the GLL has grown steadily, in both the numbers of reports that can be found there, but also the number of users downloading the works; most recently during the period May - July 2008, over 25,000 reports were downloaded from the library. But perhaps even more importantly the success of the GLL has, I believe, fed into discussions and initiatives outside the ADS about grey literature, its role within the archaeological profession, access to past paper reports, and about the issues surrounding the secure archive of current digital grey literature reports.

Associated initiatives include the Archaeotools project, outlined in previous ADS newsletters, looking at developing natural language processing tools to automatically index grey literature and other texts. Certain HERs around the country have started to put grey literature from their own areas on line and we need to think of ways in which these different grey literature digital repositories can be linked together.

But the real reason why the GLL is my favourite collection is that through it we, the ADS, have the opportunity to engage with the wider profession, contracting archaeologists and community groups and to forge closer links with local authority archaeologists too. But the GLL is a little bit like the Lotto, you have to be in it to win it, and we all have to contribute to be able to reap the potentially huge benefits to archaeological research.

Library of Unpublished Fieldwork Reports: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/library/greylit/index.cfm.

Medieval Monastic Cemeteries of Britain (1050-1600):
a digital resource and database of excavated samples

Kieron Niven

Kieron Niven,
ADS Curatorial Officer





The AHRB-funded 'Medieval Monastic Cemeteries of Britain' resource, released by ADS in 2006, presents an excellent example of a 'joined up' online archive and traditional hard-copy publication. The online resource, consisting of a database, summary site data, detailed burial data and site plans, records a range of information on over 8000 burials from 50 cemeteries spanning England, Scotland and Wales. It is this dataset that forms the basis for the 2005 publication 'Requiem: The Medieval Monastic Cemetery in Britain', a book which identifies and examines the trends in monastic burial practices between 1050 and 1600 on a UK-wide scale. As Roberta Gilchrist points out in a Sept 2005 feature in British Archaeology, the impetus behind this project was the widespread assumption that burial practices in post-12th century Christian cemeteries in the UK contained little evidence of diversity or of individual expression and therefore presented little value in terms of archaeological research. The database goes a long way to show that this is not the case. From simply looking at the resource's online search form it is easy to see that there has been a great degree of variation recorded in the way medieval monastic graves were constructed as well as in the way individuals were inhumed. The online database allows users to search by elements of the grave's construction (shape, base and wall construction, cover, and marker) as well as on aspects of the grave's occupant (age, sex, attitude and position) and wider elements such as land use and county. The result sets from a query of the database are presented in a two-stage format allowing a quick initial overview of results prior to following up individual burial entries in detail.

The detailed results also allow the user to access overall site summaries which in turn are linked to the Downloads section of the archive. The Downloads section is itself available independently of the online database and the files can be accessed either by searching on site name or by location via a map interface. The files available for download vary in terms of each individual cemetery but generally include the cemetery burial data and a site summary. Many of the cemetery datasets also include a CAD site plan which, when used alongside the burial datasets, can be imported into a GIS system and queried spatially. In summary it's not only the scope of this project that I find interesting - a burial database containing over 8000 detailed burial records spanning numerous UK wide sites is no small project - but also the way in which the data has been made available through a number of routes and can be used in a variety of different ways.

Requiem: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/archive/cemeteries_ahrb_2005/.

The Urban Landscapes of Ancient Merv

Michael Charno

Michael Charno,
ADS Curatorial Officer





From both an archaeological and technical standpoint, Merv has been the most interesting and enjoyable archive to work on during my short tenure at the ADS. It is also an exemplar in the LEAP project, so it has an associated publication in Internet Archaeology (IA), see the STOP PRESS on page 3. I worked on the archive as well as preparing the specialist interfaces for the IA article, which included Web GIS interfaces and streaming media delivery. The Web GIS interfaces allow users to interrogate the spatial data alongside the interpretive text, which hopefully enriches the users understanding of the text. The streaming media for this project is in the form of both audio and video files which are being hosted and delivered via a new University of York service. The audio files are comprised of interviews regarding two areas of the site and their meaning and significance while the video files are movies of the site made by the project team.

Urban Landscapes of Ancient Merv montage

For me, this archive was interesting from an archaeological standpoint because of the significance of the site as well as the data produced. Merv is in modern day Turkmenistan and was a major settlement on the Silk Road. The site saw settlement starting in the 6th century BC right through when it suffered a Mongol sacking in 1221 AD, ultimately habitation was re-established and continued into the 19th century. The archive relating to the site contains almost all the types of data we support at the ADS, including text documents (Portable Document Format/OpenOffice Text), digital images (JPEG/TIFF), rotating images (QuickTime VR), geospatial (ESRI Shapefiles and Geographic Markup Language files), audio files (MP3/WAV), and video files (MPG). We have rarely had an archive with this level of diversity of data. Some of the documents available for download are teaching resources for teachers, and while they are specific to Merv, provide excellent templates for teaching archaeology to children. Additionally some of the audio and video files are in Turkmen, which will certainly appeal to our large Turkmen speaking audience.

From a technical standpoint this archive also provided some good material for the dissemination of the project. The archive included a Web GIS, although with the entire spatial data set as opposed to the specific 'views' offered in the IA article. The Web GIS was a standard implementation, but does offer the user a convenient way to interrogate the data without having to download the zipped up shapefiles and aerial photos individually.

There was also a large collection of photographs, both scanned and 'born' digital. Rather than dump all these images in ascending order based on file names, simple filters were devised to enable the user to sift though this extensive dataset based on monument type, place, and category. This allows the user to focus the set of images to project defined classifications, which makes the data set significantly easier to navigate and use. This was possible only because the project/depositors provided worthwhile metadata for every single photograph deposited with us. This metadata not only provides necessary information and context for future users of this data, but also enables us as curatorial officers to enrich the Web interfaces into these data sets.

As part of the LEAP project, this archive will hopefully serve as a model for the future integration of online publications and digital archives. However, even as a standalone archive it has unique interfaces for accessing its extensive and varied data types as well as a subject matter that should pique the interest of archaeologist.

Merv: http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/archive/merv_ahrc_2008/.

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