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.