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I would just like to vent my spleen about the utter uselessness of ads.ahds.ac.uk. Trying to find anything of use is often futile its rubbish to navigate and when you find something all it tells you is the location of the file but no real info on the issue. Most SMR`s and HER`s hold all this. Rubbish Utter Rubbish, get rid.
More Coffee!! Damn You. I got a DBA to do!!
Close enough for a country job!
What do you mean lost on price again!
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Ere..... thats my mate yer venting at....
I am now adding Oasis records ... and very esay it si too
)
I do agree that it can be a pain trying to find the relelvant bit... as you alsways seem to end up back at the start...
which truely baffles me...
Its like pressing option 5 on your phone after 57 options have been pressed and then finding it should have been option 45 as option 5 takes you back to MAIN MENU ......aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaarg
One day... all records will be gathered in one portal... so you can search multiple sources from a single page... now thats the way we are going I hope.
now get back to your DBA!
"No job worth doing was ever done on time or under budget.."
Khufu
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I personally think that ADS is pretty good (especially as it can be accessed from just about anywhere and doesn't require a visit to some planning or record office stuck away in the backstreets of Arsetown, Bumshire that is only open from 1235-1240 on alternate Wednesdays, unless there is a letter 'R' in the month).
But I agree with both David and the Trowel, the public interface is 100% crap. Why not have a straight-forward key word index that uses phrases or words familiar to archaeologists (such as 'site' and 'archive' and 'report').
I used to e-mail ADS asking them to correct mistakes, I had found
(such as the whole of the Warwickshire SMR being transplated to Bedforshire because someone muddled the NGR co-ordinates), but then I started getting e-mails back suggesting that I was at fault for wanting to much information from the system, so I gave up.
I reckon with about 10% tweaking it could become really good...
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Ooo at last, someone dares speak the unspeakable! Well done Trowelhead - people have been going on about how good this is for years, but I never liked it either.
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I agree Mr Hosty one day an archaeological utopia will reign where all SMR/NMR info is on one site! I have it on good authority that one firm is already looking into this, obviously for comercial gain but hey good luck to em, wonder what that will do to county archaeologist funding. Also give me all the info in shape files and GIS type stuff so I dont spen all day sifting through pages and pages of SMR records in word. I mean it is the 21st century.[:o)]
Close enough for a country job!
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well here is broader concept.... what would you go for.... what would be the best interface
"No job worth doing was ever done on time or under budget.."
Khufu
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Best interface: I agree with Trowelhead.
Make it in the form of .shp files and then let us GIS nerds do with that as we will. As the HER is (or ought to be) a constantly changing beast, allowing downloads of .shp files will only allow a snapshot to be created of aspects of the HER on a particular date, so I see no problem there. Although I guess there will inevitably be copyright problems with maps. I personally would also like to see a mixture of raster and vector map formats.....but what do I know.
(As ADS is quite happy to host archaeological 'grey literature', perhsps they could also host 'grey' GIS data).
