The Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) is “funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee of the UK’s Higher Education Funding Council to collect, describe, and preserve the electronic resources which result from research and teaching in the humanities.” Service Providers are funded to collect, preserve, catalogue, and distribute digital resources in their discipline. Providers are co‐ordinated by an Executive located at King’s College, London; this Executive oversees the development of a cohesive collection. Holdings of AHDS include electronic texts, databases, images, and mixed media resources. To ensure the high quality of the databases, resources added to the collection are evaluated for intellectual content and potential scholarly use as well as for preservation and distribution potential. Resources may be added by organizations with deposit or co‐operative agreements with AHDS. The AHDS is developing catalogues and search mechanisms for each of its five services and an integrated gateway to enable users to search from a single point simultaneously across its distributed holdings, which will be available later this year. In the meantime, direct access to two current catalogues at the Oxford Text Archive and the History Data Service is provided through the link to “AHDS Collections”.
The “History Data Service” includes over 400 sets of data from pre‐1945 as well as access to over 7000 sets relating to post World War II. Topics include European state finance, manuscript census records, community history, aggregate statistics for the 19th and 20th centuries, political history, economic history, mortality and disease, and historical GIS information for Great Britain. Bibliographic access to the collection is available through the online catalog, BIRON. Orders for the items may then be requested from the Data Archive by completion of a “Data Access Application Form” and an “Undertaking Form” The Application Form may be completed online. The “Undertaking Form” represents a legal document of agreement to conditions of use which must be signed and sent to the Archive. Data is then provided on cartridge, disk, CD‐ROM, magnetic tape, or via an academic network within 28 days of the request. Online access is available only to academic users, who must be registered users of the relevant computer system. Charges are determined based on the source of funding for which the data will be used. A separate charge is levied for each use.
The “Archaeology Data Service” provides access to digital works that are the result of archaeological research and field work through a consortium of British institutions. Works include reports, images, photographs, and remote sensing imagery.
The “Performing Arts Data Service” is based at the University of Glasgow in Scotland and collects digital data in music, film, video, broadcast arts, theatre, and dance. The “Visual Arts Data Service” is a database of resources created by and for the use of the visual arts community. There is no description available for the “Oxford Text Archive”. At the time of this review, the link to the catalog in plain text was unavailable. The HTML version of the catalog is broken into choice by language. The catalog itself is a short list of available texts arranged alphabetically by author name. There is no search feature.
AHDS also provides links to various resources and publications, including its guides to good practice and managing digital collections series, annual reports of its Service Providers, and a newsletter of AHDS activities, and various papers on digital collections.
In various stages of development, the AHDS provides important bibliographic access to digital resources in the arts and humanities. AHDS has also taken as its mission the important goal of providing information and resources to allow for the standardization of access to electronic data. These services are important and provide valuable service to the academic community. Online access to the resources themselves, however, can be limited at present and offline delivery, in some cases, can be as long as 28 days. Hopefully, access to resources via the academic network will expand as planned and eventually allow for faster retrieval of data. Recommended.
