ARCHway: Access to the UK's best archaeology libraries and their
journals
The University of York Library, the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) and
the Research Support Libraries Programme are pleased to announce the
launch of an exciting new service for everyone involved in
archaeological research: the ARCHway Database. ARCHway provides an
integrated catalogue to the journal holdings of 25 leading academic
libraries and is set to become a fundamental resource for archaeologists
and their research.
ARCHway, which offers 3 different research tools, is available free of
charge at http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/ARCHway.html
The ARCHway "Journal Locator" describes the journal holdings of 25
leading research institutions. Between them, these libraries hold
more than 2,000 journals on every aspect of archaeological research,
covering every topic and location of interest to archaeologists
based in the UK and beyond. These journals represent many thousands
of individual volumes, and hundreds of thousands of articles and
notes. The "Journal Locator" provides the title of the journal,
contact details for each of the libraries that hold it, the volume
numbers of each journal they hold, and the years covered by these
collections. So, for example, you can find the eight libraries that
hold volume one of the "Journal of the American Research Center
in Egypt" or locate all five volumes of the "Orkney Miscellany".
The ARCHway "List of Journals" presents the same data for each of these
journals in turn, providing a short description of the content of each
journal, its publisher and ISSN, as well as a list of institutions that
hold the journal. So, if you want to check the details of any
archaeological journal, then you can find them here.
The ARCHway "Citation Index" indexes the tables of contents from
Britain's 14 most popular archaeological journals. This means that a
researcher can cross search the complete indexes of 14 journals and
identify all the articles or notes that relate to their own area of
expertise or interest. References range from as far back as 1770, and
as recently as 2001. In this way you can recover 71 different
articles concerning research at or near Winchester in journals as
diverse as Medieval Archaeology, Britannia and the Journal of
Archaeological Science. With an author search, you can track the
career of different archaeologists through the pages of these
different publications. So, you can find 73 articles written by Stuart
Piggott in the Antiquaries Journal, the Proceedings of the Prehistoric
Society, the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland
and others.
Combining these tools, you can find an article that is relevant to your
research, then find the institution nearest you that hosts it. You can
even scan the contact details to find opening times and lending
privileges.
ARCHway Project Manager Gordon Bower said "This is a fundamental
research tool that will make a significant impact on the way that
academics and others pursue their research. For the first time it
allows us to see a complete listing of all the journals available to
UK-based archaeologists. Most of the volumes listed will be available
to students either directly through reciprocal lending and browsing
agreements, or through inter-library loan."
He added "Even for well-stocked libraries, this is a major step forward,
because the tables of contents provide a really detailed view of what is
available between the covers of a volume, rather than just listing items
in stock."
The ARCHway project was led by the University of York Library, with help
from many different partners including most of the leading academic
libraries with archaeology holdings in the UK. Other Partners include
the Council for British Archaeology, the British Library, the Society of
Antiquaries of London, the Institute of Classical Studies and the
National Museums of Scotland. It was funded by the Research Support
Libraries Programme. The data is now available from the Archaeology
Data Service at http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/ARCHway.html
--
William Kilbride
User Services Manager
Archaeology Data Service
Dept of Archaeology t 0044 (0)1904 433954
University of York f 0044 (0)1904 433939
England YO1 7EP, UK m 0044 (0)7967 128632
http://ads.ahds.ac.uk e [log in to unmask]
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