ADS+: Enhancing and Sustaining the Archaeology Data Service digital repository

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The Archaeology Data Service (ADS) supports research, learning and teaching with high quality and dependable digital resources. It does this by preserving digital data in the long term, and by promoting and disseminating a broad range of data in archaeology. The ADS promotes good practice in the use of digital data in archaeology, it provides technical advice to the research community, and supports the deployment of digital technologies. It was founded in 1996 and has received support from AHRB/AHRC since 1998.The ADS now holds over one million metadata records providing pointers to digital resources covering the archaeology of the UK. It also holds the digital outputs of 25 AHRB/AHRC funded research projects, along with over 250 digital archives from projects funded by other bodies, including English Heritage, CADW, Historic Scotland, NERC, and the British Academy. These holdings represent primary data from unrepeatable excavations and research. They are essential to support the research environment of Archaeology in the UK, both in the academic sector, and beyond.Since its foundation ADS has developed a robust repository infrastructure, based around an Oracle database, a Java-based Collections Management system, and a suite of Unix servers, with onsite and offsite backup, and synchronization with the UK Data Archive in Essex. However, as ADS holdings have grown in size and number, and user expectations have also increased, this technical infrastructure has become a constraint upon enhanced access to ADS collections and, in its current form, would be costly to extend and maintain in the long term.Over the last 2-3 years the digital preservation community has embraced a software application known as Fedora (or Flexible Extensible Digital Object Repository Architecture). Fedora is a digital asset management (DAM) architecture, upon which many types of digital library, institutional repositories, and digital archives, are now being built. The implementation of Fedora at ADS would streamline the long-term curation of existing archives and cut the cost of ingest of new archives. It would also enhance access to all ADS collections in an extremely powerful fashion. Currently, users can search for digital archives at collection level, and can then 'drill down' onto each archive to search for specific files of relevance to their particular research question. Fedora is structured around collections and individual files and would allow users to search across collections for individual digital objects. Therefore all ADS users would be enabled to search within and across archives, exploring and creating links between a wide range of rich digital resources. Furthermore, Fedora would also enhance the ability of ADS to allow external systems (including search engines such as Google, as well as other data aggregators) to interrogate and link to ADS holdings at the level of individual digital objects.However, whilst 'Out-of-the-box' Fedora includes the necessary software tools to ingest, manage, and provide basic delivery of objects it has few customised tools and requires extensive software development to tailor it to the data structures and user needs of specific archives. It is an Open Source solution, which means that whilst it is freely available to download and install, a specific implementation requires significant programming investment. The implementation of Fedora at ADS would also require significant migration of existing cataloguing data and metadata enhancement, if its full power is to be realised.The ADS+ project therefore requests funding for two people - an Applications Developer and a Curatorial Officer - for one year, in order to turn ADS into a Fedora repository consistent with international ISO standards.