After more than two years of hard work and upgrades, PA-SHARE 2.0 is already shining bright! As we wrap things up this winter, we’ve managed to add a few extra enhancements to really make Surveyor glow.
For All Resource Types
Several of our latest updates to Surveyor add shine to all resource types, bringing a little extra glow to everyone’s experience in Surveyor Manager, while a few sparkling improvements have been tailored specifically to enhance the brilliance of archaeological site recordation. Together, these updates help PA-SHARE Surveyor glow even more brightly across the board!
The “Fourth Tab” – Searching and Adding Existing PA-SHARE Resources to Your Project
All PA-SHARE Surveyor projects, regardless of whether they are Above Ground surveys or archaeological projects, now display four tabs across the summary table on the survey overview page in Surveyor Manager. The first three tabs are resource-type specific, and the fourth tab is the new ability to search for and add existing PA-SHARE resources to your survey within Surveyor Manager.
From this fourth “PA-SHARE Resources” tab, there are three different search methods available to help you easily view and integrate existing resources to your project.
Survey Boundary Search
The Survey Boundary search assesses the boundary of your survey project and returns a list of all of the resources within that boundary.
Using the check box column to the left of the table, you can select one result, select a subset of the results, or select all the results and easily add them to your Surveyor project with one click.
Criteria Search
From the Criteria Search option, you can search the entire PA-SHARE dataset – not just the resources that fall geographically within your survey boundary – and fine-tune your results by adding parameters to the resource number, PASS number, resource type, or resource name fields.
Like the Survey Boundary search, you can use the check box column to the left of the table to select one row from the search results, select a subset of the results, or select all of the results of your search and easily add them to your Surveyor project with one click.
Spatial Search
The third search tool on the “fourth tab” is the Spatial Search function. Like the Survey Boundary search, this tool allows you to return a table of all of the resources within a geographic area. With this search, however, users have the ability to identify the specific area to be searched by placing a point, line, or drawing a polygon and applying a distance buffer to capture the resources that are located within that area.
Like the Survey Boundary Search and the Criteria Search, users can select resources using the far-left checkbox column and add them to the survey project with a single click.
Control over Primary Photo Designation
This Surveyor update allows submitters to have complete control over the image that they would like to have display as the “primary” photo on a PA-SHARE resource record.
One of PA-SHARE 2.0’s past updates added a headline view of the primary photo to each resource record page on PA-SHARE. Prior to this update, the default primary photo would simply have been the first photo appearing as thumbnail in Surveyor Manager.
Now users can set any photo as the primary photo by clicking the star icon in the thumbnail tile and confirming that the photo should be set as the primary photo for the resource.
Steps for primary photo designation.
Export Primary Photos Table
A previous Surveyor update added the functionality that allows users to export all of the data associated with selected resource records into a .csv table. This update upgrades Surveyor Manager’s export capabilities by adding a companion button that allows users to easily export the primary and default secondary photo for each resource record into a Word document table.
To export the primary photos table, users select resources from the table view and then click the camera icon button along the bottom of the table. After confirming the selection, the table starts to download and will appear in your device’s Downloads folder. Note that the larger your selection, the longer this download will take to process!
Steps for primary photos table export.
Archaeology Updates
As part of the final set of improvements, we want to highlight significant changes to the Archaeological Resource artifacts.
PA SHPO’s work to improve this area of our archaeological data included extensive review of the existing structure and collaboration with the Archaeology Curation staff to identify new artifact categories and type groupings to better capture this important data. As a reminder, archaeological information in Surveyor is restricted to users who individually qualify for archaeological privileges.
The improvements can be broken into two groups: data entry and data structure. Each improvement is detailed below.
Data Entry
This enhancement streamlines the artifact data entry into a single data entry screen that includes the artifact category, type and material(s). Previously, the data entry screen had users enter the artifact category and type first. Users would then have to reselect each entry to add appropriate materials and counts. This method of data entry was confusing and resulted in a loss of data.
The new single-entry form for adding artifact records.
Additionally, to help make data entry faster and easier, Surveyor now uses something called cascading dropdowns. This means that when you pick a choice from one list, it helps narrow down the options in the next list. For example, when you choose an artifact category, the artifact type list will only show the types that match that category. The same thing happens when you pick a material group — the material list will only show materials that belong to that group.
The picture above showcases one example of how selecting an Artifact Category will now dynamically filter for Artifact Types.
Materials are now split into Material Groups and Artifact Materials. Selecting the overall Material group will filter the corresponding artifact materials list. Quantities should be added as appropriate.
Data Structure and Conversion
As touched on in the data entry section, a second large component of this work included reviewing the data structure and values used for artifact recordation and updating these to be more compatible with the Archaeology Curation Section’s standards as well as more reflective of current trends and terminology for artifacts. This conversion effort also standardized legacy data that was unsearchable through the Search interface in PA-SHARE.
With the new structure, we are emphasizing the physical description of the artifacts. This will allow for more cross comparison of sites across the Commonwealth. Now as new data is recorded in Surveyor and uploaded to PA-SHARE, it will be searchable to be cross referenced with legacy archaeological collections.
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