One of the many responsibilities of the Collections and Archives department is creating and uploading content to the York Archaeology Collections website. Recently we completed the project of digitising and adding three series of York Archaeological Trust publications – Interim, Yorkshire Archaeology Today, and Northern Archaeology Today – to the website.
The Interim series was established in 1973 with the intention of sharing current work and recent discoveries with the general public in a way that was “informative but informal and inexpensive.” It was published several times a year until 2001, when it was replaced by Yorkshire Archaeology Today. This new publication provided updates on Trust activity from fieldwork to the attractions and in 2005 made the leap into glorious technicolour, enabling readers to enjoy site and artefact photographs in colour.
By 2012, the Trust encompassed not only the original York office but also ArcHeritage in Sheffield, Northlight Heritage in Glasgow, and Trent & Peak Archaeology in Nottingham. Northern Archaeology Today was launched to reflect the increased scope of our work across the Midlands and north of England, and ran until 2018.
Articles across the publications cover everything from the initial discovery of the Viking town at Coppergate in the 1970s to the excavations of richly furnished Roman burials at Hungate in 2010.
The Digitisation Process
Before we could make these important parts of York Archaeology’s history available online, we had to lay the groundwork. Archive Assistant Catherine Reagan located, created, and cleaned the metadata for all 125 issues so they could be added to the website, scouring every volume to find dates, names, article titles, etc., to provide a full picture of the contents. We identified archaeological sites in the individual articles, then cross-referenced them with excavations on the website so that they could be linked on the site. This allows users to search not only by volume and issue number, but also by publication date and sites mentioned. All of this information was added and formatted onto a spreadsheet to be uploaded onto the Collections website to populate individual web pages with this useful information, and copies of the publication itself.
Now all Interims, Yorkshire Archaeology Todays, and Northern Archaeology Todays are fully digitised and available on the Publications page on the Collections website. Watch this space for future publications!
