Trends in Spatial Data Deposition at the Archaeology Data Service

Abstract

Founded in 1996, the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) is an accredited digital repository for archaeological and cultural heritage data. Over the past 25 years, ADS has accumulated over 22TB of data from more than three million files. Working with colleagues, within both the academic and commercial sectors, ADS has worked to actively promote best practice and improved standards, whilst providing archiving services that ensure the ongoing preservation and dissemination of datasets, including Computer-Aided Design (CAD) and Geographic Information Systems (GIS) , produced by the profession. To this end, ADS has helped create and maintain a series of Guides to Good Practice to actively promote and explain best practice for both born-digital and digitised material. Given its history, ADS can work as a sort of time capsule that shows what methods of documentation were being used and preserved during excavations. Over the past five years, ADS has seen an increase in the quantity of vector data deposited and the amount of GIS submitted has decreased. Furthermore, between 2014 and 2019, ADS received over 38,500 text-based reports via OASIS. This implies a trend of data created by practitioners never making its way to ADS outside of a report, by which point the data held inside the report is not in an easily reusable state. This paper also reviews some of the challenges of preserving spatial data, focusing on the development and stability of formats and the need for appropriate metadata.