Tim Evans is Deputy Director at the Archaeology Data Service.
As I would imagine is the case with the vast majority of people, it's been an unusual year at the Archaeology Data Service. Since moving into lockdown 12 months ago most members of staff have been working remotely, connected only by the ubiquitous Zoom meetings. With Spring in the air, and things just showing signs of returning to normal here in the UK it's inevitably a time for reflection.
Ultimately 2020/2021 has been a period of significant change, yet despite all the problems of remote working and home schooling it has been one of genuine achievement. As ever, I'm indebted to a committed body of staff for all their hard work. For example in April 2020 we received CoreTrustSeal status, one of the outcomes of that, and exercises like the DPC RAM, has been a renewed effort in documenting, evolving and improving our internal archival workflows (making them simpler!) whilst also looking at how we best incorporate FAIR, and improving wider accessibility to the data we hold. A key strategic project has been our involvement in the ARIADNE portal, a powerful user interface enabling exploration of heritage records and archaeological archives from across the world. The portal already enables access to data from the UK, Netherlands, Hungary, Italy, Greece, Slovenia, Spain, Bulgaria, Romania and Sweden, with additional countries being added weekly. It's a truism but continuing to explore ways in which we share metadata of our archives is of the utmost importance, and we plan to build on this success in the future.
Meanwhile, the amount of data being deposited with the ADS - despite COVID - increases every month. The archaeological profession in the UK is now tackling its digital archive issues head on, with planning/development work being required to secure digital data with a trusted digital repository. With this has come an increased focus on how we work with our 'designated community' to ensure deposition workflows are optimal, but also on our own ingest mechanisms. As ever there is, to my mind, still a disparity in places between 'what we want' and 'what we actually get', so in the future I hope to introduce easier ways of recording metadata (for example), as well as much more work in helping our community to understand archival requirements.
Perhaps unusually for us, the year has probably seen the least amount of PDF/A related chat for some time...
As a final note, a summary of the year wouldn't been complete without mentioning that in December 2020 two long serving members of staff - who would have been known to many of the DPC community- Donna Page and Ray Moore, left for pastures new. They will be much missed. Now we're looking at welcoming some new members of staff, and getting them enrolled on the fantastic DPC Novice to Know-How course!