The Archaeology Data Service (ADS) is a digital archive for heritage data based in the University of York. As a digital archives assistant, my role is to archive the digital data produced as part of archaeological projects in both the commercial sector and from academic research.
Sometimes the archaeological data I archive includes exciting formats like GIS, photogrammetry or 3D data; but more often than not I can be found (drowning) swimming in a sea of PDFs. My main task for today is to finish transferring this month’s batch of grey literature reports from OASIS to the ADS Grey Literature Library. These reports mainly consist of PDFs that document archaeological investigations undertaken by commercial archaeology units in the UK, although academic and community archaeology projects can also be recorded using OASIS. There’s an unusually high number of reports this month (1485!) and it’s definitely one of the more tedious parts of my job, but also allows me to archive a lot of data in a relatively short space of time. It’s always a nice feeling when the backlog is cleared!
Having finished accessioning all the reports over the past week, the next stage of the process is to create a unique DOI for each report I’ve archived. Fortunately, I can mint DOIs as a batch process for all the reports in one go, so I set it running in the background while I check the ADS social media accounts and catch up on what's happened in the world of #digipres over the weekend.
Once this is done, I do a quick bit of data cleaning on a list of all 767 report authors I've exported from an SQL database to ensure the data is entered as accurately as possible. I can then run software to load information from the database tables and into the ADS library. This imports metadata such as author and publisher information, abstracts, subject and period keywords, and displays the newly minted DOI and a link to download the report. A recent addition to the ADS Library, for example, includes this historic building survey and community archaeology project in Muggleswick, County Durham (Addyman Archaeology, 2012).
This afternoon, I’ll be checking through the new records to ensure that everything has entered the library correctly, and then I can finally wash my hands of the grey literature transfer! (for another month at least).
I'll be able to get back to archiving some more diverse and interesting data sets later today, and will undoubtedly fall down the rabbit hole of reading all the other fascinating Day In Archaeology posts. Older posts from the previous 'Day of Archaeology' can also be found in the Day of Archaeology Archive hosted by the ADS.