Dear all,
We're very pleased to announce a significant enhancement to the ADS's
online presence: a new version of ArchSearch. This extends greatly the
service we provide to those in the teaching, learning and research
communities with interests in the historic environment.
As you may know, we've been working hard in the last while on the second
generation of ArchSearch, the ADS's main metadata catalogue. This work
has involved a root and branch overhaul of our systems, from hardware
and software right through to data modelling and support systems. It's
much more than a face lift. The changes we have made are based on
detailed user needs study and participant observation.
The time for release is here. The system has been stable since the
start of June, and last month we did an extended focus group to identify
snags. Some of you will already have noticed that we gave the system a
soft launch on Monday. We now want to tell you all about it!
http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/
You can do a great deal more with the new catalogue than you could do
with the old one. Highlights include:
* You can search across multiple fields simultaneously
* You can refine a search if you get too many hits the first time around
* You can do a "when" search
* You can search by a specific id
* You can specify the databases you want to search
* You can bookmark specific pages or results in the catalogue
* You can chose which fields you want to view
* You can have tabular or linear output of results
* You can generate files for your own use
* You can build urls out of queries for use as hotlinks on web pages
* We get emailed automatically with the details of every error that
occurs
What does that mean in practice? For example you can do things like:
* search for all the records on "abbey" in "barrow in furness" without
getting all the "abbeys" and all the "barrows" in the country
* narrow down your search for material in london to roman mosaics
* cite and recall records by their reference numbers (try: EHNMR-631665)
* refer directly to records in urls. To see what I mean, try:
http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/search/fr.cfm?rcn=EHNMR-631665
* build small database file for all the mottes in Cumbria and Lancashire
then include them in your own database or GIS
* break it and have the fault reported without having to lift a finger!
There's a lot more behind the scenes that we won't bore you with -
things like server response times which are vastly improved, stylesheets
that allow you to format your results to suit, software that allows us
to package data in new ways and much much more. There will be time to
explore all this new functionality in the coming months.
Next week we are going to launch 4 new collections:
*The National Trust Sites and Monuments Record
*Lower Palaeolithic Technology, Raw Material and Population Ecology
Archive
*Scalloway: A Broch, Late Iron Age Settlement and Medieval Cemetery
*West Yorkshire Archaeology Service Geophysics Archive
In the meantime, we hope you find this new interface intuitive. It is
certainly more powerful and flexible. It represents a significant
improvement in the service we provide.
All best wishes,
William
--
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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