Digital Literacy

The key issue of digital literacy and professional digital education was prevalent across all sessions at the Archaeological Archives as a Resource. Caitriona Crowe's proposed network would address many of the key issues of continuous professional development - as a standards led digital environment will (should be) a basis for any funding by the state or the EU, and we also need to act now to ensure that future work is not hampered by choices now - for instance choosing an xml based entry or record system rather than PDF will help future participants.

The rapidity of technological advance means that upskilling is crucial, but also reinforces the need for basic open standards for digitisation and metadata - robust metadata that withstands the vagaries of software is essential.  Open data is at the centre of these concerns - work paid for by the state must be accessible to the taxpayer - and that means the data, and not just the report of one individual which, while crucial is not the only output necessary for future engagement with our archaeological heritage.

Stuart Jeffrey - Surviving the Digital Dark Ages

Archaeological archives as a resource - part of the ADS the Archaeological Data Service. Stuart gives a good diagram about information entropy - from Jeff Rothenberg, RAND Corp., 1997 - in the '90s digital information was supposed to be the solution to this. Yet hardware mass storage formats are changing constantly, still hardware is not the key issue - the key issue is software and migration. He examines the tension between the collapsing cost of storage and the size of data collected.

He maintains that the cost of ingest and management remains the same - whether a digital or a paper archive.

One solution is OAIS - open archival information systems - he describes their ARCHsearch technology, which is excellent.

DOIs (Digital Object Identifiers) have made a huge difference - a permanently resolvable URL - it is a huge step forward as a way of citing digital archives...

He speaks about Europeana, and Linked Data too, finishes with a list of challenges - such as the permanent flux of technology, and automated ingest, search paradigms and research/commercial culture. The successes are tool development like OASIS and FISH, the integration into workflow is crucial, embedded into funding bodies, publishing and outreach.

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.