Welcome

Guide to Good Practice for Aerial Survey

Welcome to the Guides to Good Practice for Aerial Survey

The primary aim of the Guides to Good Practice is to provide information on the best way to create, manage, and document digital material produced during the course of an archaeological project. The ultimate aim of the Guides is to improve the practice of depositing and preserving digital information safely within an archive for future use. A fundamental principle of these Guides is that any digital data produced from archaeological investigation should be managed and archived in a digital format. This approach precludes costly re-digitisation in the future while ensuring maximum accessibility and reusability of the data. Digital archiving also preserves the functionality of complex datasets such as GIS, CAD, and relational databases that simply could not exist outside of a digital medium.

Further information about these guidelines can be found on the Archaeology Data Service website.

History of the Guides to Good Practice

This new set of guidelines aims to revise and expand upon an original series of Guides to Good Practice created by the Archaeology Data Service (ADS) as part of the UK’s Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS). Between 1998 and 2002, six Guides were published covering the creation and archiving of data within a number of key project types including aerial photography, excavation and geophysical survey, GIS, CAD and virtual reality. These original Guides individually drew together a number of key authors and contributors, all active in their respective fields, in order to produce widely relevant material that was subsequently reviewed and approved in both academic and non-academic circles. The new Guides also incorporate a fuller US perspective on the topic, having been reviewed and updated in collaboration with Digital Antiquity—which oversees the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR)—as well as other US partners.

Pathways through these guides

The Guides to Good Practice have been created in order to allow a degree of flexibility in how they can be used. General preservation themes are discussed in the early chapters and are followed by chapters which look at common project lifecycle (i.e. non-technique specific and widely applicable) elements such as file naming, metadata creation and copyright. These lifecycle chapters are then followed by technique and file type-specific chapters and, finally, by chapters dealing with archive structuring and deposit. The Guides are essentially designed so that users can proceed from the introductory material to the specific chapters relevant to their data types and then on to the concluding “structuring and depositing” chapters. While all chapters have been written with a certain degree of self-containment in mind, users are advised to at least be aware of the wider preservation issues raised in the introductory chapters to these Guides when using the technique or file type focused chapters.

This Guide

This guide is the Guides to Good Practice for Aerial Survey. This guide is intended to provide good practice guidelines for the creation and preservation of digital resources resulting from aerial photogrpahy, satellite and airborne remote sensing and archaeological interpretations from these resources. The guide is divided into a number of chapters, which are listed below:

• About this guide
• 1. Aerial Photography, Remote Sensing and Archaeology
• 2. Digital Data Sources
• 3. Documenting your Resource
• 4. Archiving your Data
• 5. References

These chapters can also be naviagted using the navigation pane on the left hand side of the screen.

Citing this guide

You can cite this guide using the project’s Zenodo archive using this DOI: https://10.5284/zenodo.??????. A full citation is provided below:

Sample Citation for this DOI

Bob Bewley, Danny Donoghue, Vince Gaffney, Martijn van Leusen, Alicia Wise (1998). Revised by Bob Bewley and Kieron Niven, Archaeology Data Service / Digital Antiquity (2011), Guides to Good Practice. DOI: https://doi.org/10.5284/??????

Make sure to include the DOI in your citation for this guide. Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) are persistent identifiers which can be used to consistently and accurately reference digital objects and/or content. The DOIs provide a way for the ADS resources to be cited in a similar fashion to traditional scholarly materials. More information on DOIs at the ADS can be found on our help page.

All material in this guide is available open access under a CC-BY 4.0 licence.