The long term curation of Archaeological Archives of NI: Problems and Solutions

Macdonald addresses the scale of the challenge in the cost of storage with concrete examples using conservative estimates. He chooses to highlight the access problem, and the legal title problem. He addresses the reasons for the problem - the lack of capacity is one. This is exacerbated with low staffing levels in the museum sector - these are risible in contrast with a similar sized area, Wales. The second problem is in planning policy - while developers are to fund, to enable public participation in excavations, they are not required to fund long-term curation of the data. He advocates the revision of PPS 6. NIAF the Northern Ireland Archaeological Forum has prioritised the archives issue.