The Online Access to the Index of Archaeological Investigations (OASIS) Project: Facilitating Access to Archaeological Grey Literature in England and Scotland.

The advent of developer-funded fieldwork in many countries has inevitably led to an increase in the production of fieldwork reports. Despite being a major resource for archaeological research the majority of these reports have remained unpublished and are often only accessible via the local authority curators or state historic preservation offices (in the UK known as Historic Environment Records). In the United Kingdom the OASIS project (Online AccesS to the Index of archaeological investigations) exists as a collaborative venture between the Archaeology Data Service, English Heritage, Historic Scotland, the Royal Commission for Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland and the Archaeological Investigations Project. The project has aimed to provide data to create an easily maintainable and publicly accessible unified index to archaeological investigations. In addition, it has created a system by which fieldwork reports can be deposited in a digital format with the Archaeology Data Service. In February 2005, the Archaeology Data Service was able to make public its growing archive of such fieldwork reports. There are now over x reports in this grey literature library, and this is being added to at the rate of 100 a month. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]