CLIR (the Council on Library and Information Resources) recently released a comprehensive report, “Rome Wasn’t Digitized in a Day”: Building a Cyberinfrastructure for Digital Classics, which covers various issues in the technology and overall status of digital classics research. Authored by Alison Babeu, the report’s archaeology section features the work of Digital Antiquity and tDAR, as well as that of our colleagues at ADS (Archaeology Data Service) in the UK and Open Context in the US. Although tDAR is currently focused on American archaeology, Babeu noted its potential for preservation of and access to digital classics information, as well as its importance as a tool of discovery for archaeologists performing new research. tDAR’s search feature–which extrapolates relationships between datasets based on user queries–was also explained as a unique method of comprehending the digital archaeological record. Digital Antiquity, ADS and Open Context were each lauded for their work on best practices in digital data curation; although each has a different approach to dealing with the digital archaeological record, all are focused on ensuring the longevity and accessibility of that information.
Tag: report
Digital Antiquity announces Reports in Digital Archaeology, a series devoted to issues related to archaeological information, including:
- research and practice in digital archiving of archaeological materials,
- policy and other challenges facing the preservation of archaeological results,
- advanced uses of tDAR,
- research projects funded by the DA-tDAR Grants Program, and
- major data accessions or partnerships.
The Reports series is free of charge and available on the Digital Antiquity website.
The first two Reports have been published and include, “Building tDAR: Review, Redaction, and Ingest of Two Reports Series” (J. Watts, June 2011) and “Policies, Preservation, and Access to Digital Resources: The Digital Antiquity 2010 National Repositories Survey” (J. Watts, September 2011). The first paper focuses on the process of preparing pre-existing archaeological reports for and ingesting them to tDAR, discussing especially the problems presented by a series of reports spanning thirty years of archaeological work and publication. The second is geared toward an analysis of the present state of digital archaeological preservation and access on the national scale, and helps to explain many of the challenges associated with the management of legacy digital resources.
If you are interested in submitting to Reports in Digital Archaeology, please contact Digital Antiquity.