ADS Guides to Good Practice get a major update.

Guides to Good Practice logo

The much used ADS Guides to Good Practice (G2GP) are being enhanced with new and updated content.

Kieron Niven

Kieron Niven,
Editor, Guides to Good Practice.




From January of this year, the ADS began work on a collaborative two-year project to revise and develop our series of Guides to Good Practice. The current set of six ADS guides, still freely available from our website, were published between 1998 and 2002 with the aim of providing guidelines for creating, documenting and archiving digital resources commonly produced by archaeological projects. However, due to rapid developments over the last few years both in computing and archaeology, the time has now come to revisit these guides and to revise and expand them where necessary.

The new guides project aims to not only encompass important revisions to the existing six ADS Guides to Good Practice but will also see the development of a number of entirely new documents covering areas such as marine and terrestrial remote scanning, GPS, digital audio and digital video. Where possible, previous authors have been asked to revise their existing content and new authors, from both Europe and the US, have been enlisted to contribute to the development of the new guides covering new themes and areas.

Digital Antiquity

Remora 2000 submersible being launched

The project to develop the Guides has largely come about as a result of the involvement of the ADS with Digital Antiquity. Digital Antiquity is a US based initiative, funded by the Mellon Foundation, with the aim of creating "a collaborative organization devoted to enhancing preservation and access to digital records of archaeological investigations". As a result of our involvement in this project a major aim of the revised guides is to develop the basis for workflows for the creation of digital datasets that can be effectively archived both by Digital Antiquity's tDAR repository in the US and by the ADS in the UK.

Involvement in the Digital Antiquity project has also meant that our revised Guides to Good Practice can, and in fact need to, extend their scope to include variations in data creation and usage beyond those currently practiced in the UK. In order to incorporate US variations, the development of the new guides will involve close collaboration with teams in the US at both the University of Arkansas and Arizona State University, both of whom are major partners in Digital Antiquity.

In addition to the Digital Antiquity project, other ADS projects are also planned to feed into the revision and development of the new guides. ADS involvement in the European VENUS project has already resulted in a new guide focussing on marine remote scanning and photogrammetry. This guide is currently available via the VENUS project page on the ADS website and will form the basis for an expanded marine guide to be released alongside our other new Guides to Good Practice.

In addition, the incorporation of findings from the 2006 ADS Big Data project, together with the revision of the existing Guide to Good Practice on aerial photography and terrestrial remote sensing, will see a significant contribution to the new set of guides from English Heritage funded projects.

Wiki

As a direct result of the new guides being contributed to by a wide range of authors from a number of different countries, the Guides to Good Practice are being created, revised and expanded within a wiki environment as a purely online set of publications. The use of such collaborative technology is hoped to make the creation and revision of the new guides a faster and more immediate process which will also allow contributions from a range of people at a number of different levels. It is also hoped that the use of wiki technology will also make any future major revisions a far easier process.

At present the new Guides to Good Practice are currently under development but will be publicly available from January 2011.

GUIDES TO GOOD PRACTICE (current versions): http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/project/goodguides/g2gp.html

DIGITAL ANTIQUITY AND tDAR :http://www.digitalantiquity.org/.

http://www.tdar.org/.

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