Over the decades, many individual researchers, students, and local community members have participated in our broadly defined research activities, conducting field and laboratory research, and they have, cumulatively, woven a tapestry of knowledge regarding some 2,000 years of the interaction between peoples and their landscapes in our study area. Many project participants have moved on to other interests and some have passed away. Homes and personal archives have sadly burned, and offices and labs have been flooded. All while an analogue method of work has transitioned to a digital paradigm that is completely unrecognizable from how we began our journey.
As this project slowly winds down, the issues of both analog and digital data preservation and means of providing continued access to other researchers who may be interested in accessing our vast repositories and datasets has become one of great interest to our group. How can we address the proper archiving and metadata of thousands of individual analog and digital records and datasets located in multiple institutions and attics? How can we even accurately know what we all have? How can these be properly archived and preserved? And most importantly, how can other researchers gain access to these for future use after we are no longer here to share them?
Methods and materials
Digital archiving has become an established field of study, primarily within schools of library and information science. It integrates traditional library and archives methods and theory, computer science, databases, the internet, and the various disciplinary traditions of those seeking to properly archive their data. It began as more of an end-of-career records repository, but has evolved to be a tool provided to new hires to be used throughout ones career. This has also been a subject of important discussion within the archaeology community and CAA (Huvila 2008, Wright and Richards 2018, Richards et al. 2021). In our discovery process, we have evaluated several currently available digital archiving environments, and have worked with experts in the field to better understand the capabilities, processes, strengths, and limitations of these various capabilities. Tools investigated include DSpace, from MIT, and UNC’s Dataverse, among others.
Results
We have begun an initial analysis of our needs and goals, along with an initial investigation into what digital archiving is and what it, in its current state of evolution, can (and cannot) provide to our particular situation. As a practical first step, we have begun to amass the first order listing of extant data, in both analog and digital formats, from various current and former project participants. These include general data type, amounts, condition, location, sensitivity, ownership, etc. A simple Excel spreadsheet on a Google Docs folder has been created to catalogue what and how much of each type of record has been located for use in this project.
Much of our existing analog data is in the process of being scanned, including large numbers of 35 mm slides (remember those?), field and aerial photographs, historical documents and manuscripts, paper maps, and other field and lab documents and archival records. Most of these still do not have any metadata, provenance, or keywords at this point. Our digital data include large amounts of scanned maps, documents, and photos, and also an extensive project GIS and remote sensing archive, databases, websites, posters, and more. Our next step will be to evaluate our various options in terms of digital archiving software and institutional support available to our project members, and then we intend to map out a realistic work program to populate our archives. We envision multiple archives as we are affiliated with several institutions who can assist us. We will then begin the actual process of creating, annotating, and managing our project digital archives.
Discussion
This is an ongoing process and we do not yet have final results. But our situation is likely mirrored throughout the archaeological community. Large landscape projects, including archaeological, historical ecology, and related activities, often consist of multiple researchers from many different disciplines, institutions, and academic perspectives. Each participant brings with them large amounts of disparate raw, intermediate, and finished data in both analog and digital formats.
Such projects can be very long-lived, continuing for several decades, with both people, technologies, data formats, and media coming and going over time. Such projects can generate massive amounts of data, both digital and analog, which should be properly conserved and archived, and these should also be made available as a matter of course to the largest possible number of researchers, both within the project as well as beyond, after initial publication of results. Proper care must be taken for human subjects and sensitive archaeological site data, even after the specific project is ended.
Digital archiving and related tools now exist that can be incorporated into new projects directly as they begin, so that they become another tool for the use of the researchers, but this requires specific knowledge and expertise outside our fields, which is not always available to archaeological projects. Our project has struggled to keep track of the data held by various participants over the years, and significant data has also been lost. Data retained by former participants is rarely scanned or catalogued, nor does it contain metadata or is it accessible using keywords or geotags. We hope that our experiences in seeking, well after the fact, to incorporate this important new capability into our work will be useful not only for our project and researchers in our ongoing work, but also for those who may come after us. We also hope that our experiences will be helpful to the larger community, to assist others to incorporate these tools into their future work as a matter of course.
References
Huvila, I. “Participatory archive: towards decentralised curation, radical user orientation, and broader contextualisation of records management”. Arch Sci 8, 15–36 (2008). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-008-9071-0
Richards, J.D., Jakobsson, U., Novák, D., Štular, B. and Wright, H. 2021 “Digital Archiving in Archaeology: The State of the Art”. Internet Archaeology 58. https://doi.org/10.11141/ia.58.23
Wright, H. and Richards, J.D. 2018 “Reflections on collaborative archaeology and large-scale online research infrastructures”, Journal of Field Archaeology 43, supp1., S60-S67 https://doi.org/10.1080/00934690.2018.1511960
DSpace GIS live link:
http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/33459
An extensive report on digital archiving, including comparison of software,
http://www.dspace.org/images/stories/leadirs.pdf
Cambridge Univ. DSpace site:
http://www.lib.cam.ac.uk/repository/
http://www.dspace.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/274
NEHU Univ. in India
DSpace at MIT
http://libraries.mit.edu/dspace-mit/
and two faculty using it:
http://libraries.mit.edu/dspace-mit/about/mcdowell.html
http://libraries.mit.edu/dspace-mit/about/mckinley.html
A USEFUL GENERAL REFERENCE
http://www.nyu.edu/its/pubs/pdfs/NINCH_Guide_to_Good_Practice.pdf