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.

Knowledge shared online

After the stimulating discussion and debate at last Friday's Honest to Blog, organised by Pue's Occurrences, and having had many discussions about the relative merits of social media, I took the plunge in to the twitterverse tonight.

And I found a lively, stimulating online debate amongst fellow scholars about what is happening at Glasgow at present and also a host of useful links and online discussions useful to my own interests. Paperless Archaeology is one at the Digital Classicist list.

I should have known that epigraphers would be ahead of the crowd with new media.