Today's Day in Archaeology is, I think, the 86th day of me working from home since the March lockdown. My name is Tim and I'm the Deputy Director of the Archaeology Data Service (link below), based within the Department of Archaeology at the University of York.

It's been something of a slog; for most of this time my wife and I (also an archaeologist, also working from home) have had to balance looking after our children (including home-schooling a six year old) with our respective work commitments.

Most of the days have been rigidly split into working/childare shifts (depending on who has the ubiquitous Zoom meeting that morning/afternoon). The children's bed time has acted as the key demarcation of the day, and the beginning of the precious quiet time to "crack on with work" as the sun sets and the radio plays gently in the background. Fridays have taken on the form of a respite, the last emails checked and sent before the chance of two days of simply not having to balance doing the best by family and work.

I'm aware my colleagues have all have their burdens to bear as well: two members of staff have been very ill with COVID19 over the Spring, over half the staff have childcare/teaching commitments of all different ages, others have restricted space to work, concerns over the health of family and friends and so on. As lockdown has begun to lift, albeit in an organic fashion in the UK, my perspective has begun to return and I'm able to sit back a bit more than usual and reflect on what - despite everything - my fantastic colleagues have been able to achieve.

Looking over the list of annual strategic objectives set back in August 2019, it's obvious that thanks to my colleagues' continued hard-work we're already on course to meet all our major targets. For example Ray has successully gained us CoreTustSeal accreditation, Jo is fine tuning the new OASIS system, Judith has continued to release some great Open Access papers in Internet Archaeology (link below), the Archvists continue to release a wide range of quality content (link below), and Holly, Katie and Julian continue to develop new partnerships and project ideas for the future that promise to put us in a very strong position over the next few years.

And what about me? Some days it seems as if, to quote from one of my favourite books (Nostromo) "it was mere aimless wandering; he had written nothing, collected nothing, brought nothing for science out of the twilight of the forests". There's an incomplete paper on metadata standards in archaeology languishing on my google drive, a continuing project to improve acccess to resources such as the Library, writing my notes/slides for two presentations I'm giving later this week, and trying to finish a piece of work creating a specification for using the CrossRef API to find where ADS/IA DOIs have been cited, and then feed this back into the relevant record as a 'Cited By' tool.

Most of these are driven by a wider determination to improve access to our data, and faciliatiate re-use and engagement from across our community. There are some big things in the pipeline over the next few years as we all think about how to improve the service. When they come to fruition we may even be back in the office...