The Archaeology Data Service is currently undertaking a collaborative project with Digital Antiquity to broaden and update our series of Guides to Good Practice. The project will encompass important revisions of the existing six ADS Guides as well as the development of entirely new documents covering areas such as marine scanning, laser scanning, GPS, digital audio and digital video. Previous authors have been asked to revise existing content and new authors, from both Europe and the US, will contribute to the development of the guides into new themes and areas.

The project is in collaboration with the Digital Antiquity initiative, a US-based project with the aim of enhancing the preservation of and access to digital records of archaeological investigations. A major aim of the Guides is to provide the basis for archaeological project workflows that will create digital datasets that can be archived and shared effectively by Digital Antiquity's tDAR repository in the US and by the Archaeology Data Service in the UK. The development of the Guides involves close collaboration with teams in the US at both the University of Arkansas and Arizona State University.

Other ADS projects are also planned to feed into the revision and development of the Guides. ADS involvement in the European VENUS project will result in one of the first published guides focussing on marine scanning and photogrammetry. In addition, the incorporation of findings from the ADS Big Data project, together with the revision of the existing guide on aerial photography and remote sensing data, will see a significant contribution to the guides from English Heritage funded projects.

The new Guides are under development with only certain sections publicly available. The new Guides to Good Practice are scheduled to be released in early 2011.

Previous versions of the ADS/AHDS Guides to Good Practice have been archived and are still available on the old Guides to Good Practice page.

View the full Table of Contents