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.

Anthony Corns of the Discovery Program on The Data Volume Problem

Anthony Corns of the Discovery Program, speaking at the Royal Irish Academy (RIA), he advocates digtial archiving, moving from the pilot Share It program - and is involved now in the ArcLand european international project. ArcLand is concerned with creating a Spatial Data Infrastructure SDI - which is as far as he is concerned the 'glue' that holds it all together.

Issues arise such as:
building shared resources,

allowing for the reuse of archaeology data,

reuse of technology /policy developed in other domains using things like Creative Commons

They decided to build a trusted digital repository and spatial server - using D Space rather than Fedora.

2012 - 2014

ArcLand Heritage Data Knowledge they are getting the data migrated into archive and web services established

Construct a Geo-portal

Standards are critical

Access via Europeana?

How to we access it all? Rather than just accessing it - we have to give it back in a structured way.

This reinforces everything that I have previously being saying on this blog with regard to structuring the knowledge as it is created, rather than trying to retrofit in a situation where there are few resources.

A new Web Editor for Aigne

Aigne's current web editor will be leaving us after this edition so if anyone would like to learn the necessary coding, style sheets and other requirements of the Publishing Unit that Aigne must adhere to, please contact me or Niamh Nic Chonmara before this coming Monday 9th Jan.

Our web editor works directly with Peter Flynn in the Publishing Unit of UCC. The web editor, is responsible for coding docx and pdf versions of all published articles and reviews. They are also given access to UCC's uploading interface designed specifically for UCC e-journals.

It is envisioned that the person learning from our current web editor for this edition will take on full editorial duties for the next. The busiest times for the web editor is the very end of the review process, just before publication.

Publish Post

More information on our editorial meeting and the beginning of the review process will follow in shortly.

Learn to program: Make a free weekly coding lesson your New Year’s resolution.

Learn to program: Make a free weekly coding lesson your New Year’s resolution.

A new year and a new resolution - mine in this case to learn to do some more programming via the very accessible codeacademy. The link is above - it isn't as much as an hour a day, and the benefits in terms of the personal challenge and skills will be great.

'Frontline' tweet 'earth-shattering'

'Frontline' tweet 'earth-shattering'

This article from the Irish Times newspaper looks at a number of issues arising from the chairperson of the final Irish Presidential debate before the election asking a question prompted by a tweet.

Indeed in the creation of liveness, spontaneity and engagement many current affairs programs use twitter and SMS as ways of allowing their audiences to engage with material under discussion. The difference here it seems, is that the production team took a tweet as being from a particular source, but that tweet was not from where it appeared to be from. It was not checked - no one looked at the other tweets from the source, or checked to look at the tweets from the political party it claimed to represent - and the result (we voters in Ireland know) was 'earth shattering'. New media and old media are not the same - the new mimics the old, but is utterly different in many respects. Authenticity is at the heart of this - anonymity and the filters that old media must uphold...

Taking stock of our pooled research

Taking stock of our pooled research

Claire O Connell in today's Irish Times is writing about a group of Medical Research hospitals that have come together to create a shared database, to further research.

Now a new initiative is linking cancer biobanks between hospitals in Dublin, Cork and Galway.

As she says herself: The word “bank” might be somewhat tainted these days, but how about this more altruistic model: depositors donate, the “currency” helps fuel biomedical research and the end results can lead towards improved therapies for patients.

“Biobanking is saving biological samples such as human tissue, blood or urine, for research purposes,” explains Prof Eoin Gaffney, a consultant histopathologist at St James’s Hospital and Trinity College Dublin.

The process looks straightforward on the surface – but “It’s no use just storing samples, you need to have a good annotated database that tells you where the samples are and what types of samples they are, as well as pathological data and clinical data,” he says.

This is another example of how sharing data, but not just raw data, but data that has been made meaningful by researchers in the field, can enrich research for all