Dear Janet et alia

Thanks for your e-mail.  In my fieldwork days, I used to record weather, people problems, exact dates or times, precise soil textures, how many people on site, costs of equipment and things, etc, etc, all sorts of rubbish.  

These days what I look for in the first instance is meta-data, and this can be digital.  For example: where was the dig, what month or year it was, what purpose was it for or its origination (to what development or academic project does it belong), what broad classes of evidence did it produce, what is the archaeological interest of that evidence, what story does it say about our past, what does the archive consist of and where is it located.  

Almost always, I find the meta-data more readily available and understandable in the specialists or finds reports rather than the main report, because they have to give a potted history of the project as a context for their work.  Indeed, most excavation reports I read fail to "see the wood for the trees".  

If I needed to research excavation archives, I would prefer to investigate paper or primary records, not digital.  For one thing, the primary records form a palimpsest of thinking, a process of coming to a conclusion: initial records, erasings, revisions, marginalia, draft and final reports.  I don't think any digital archive could be so intimate, genuine, or "deeply layered".  With some archives that I have been directly responsible for, I have in fact thrown away documents or data that have no bearing on the archaeological understanding produced by the dig: travel claims, admin details, draft bids for funding, etc.  But I have always kept even the smallest scrap of paper or find if it 'held' an idea or process that affected understanding.  

In creating any archive, I feel that future researchers will always want to get to the heart of our current understanding first, before seeking ways or means to extend or change understanding.  Accordingly, I select the items in an archive to give a picture or algorithm of the process that was followed to arrive at the understanding deriving from the particular work.  If future researchers don't like my 'editing' so to speak, that's their problem, not mine. They can always use sophisticated content analyses, or create their own polemical archives, to sort out their problems or change the understanding of their times. 
Cheers, Neil

>>> [log in to unmask] 30/01/2001 01:49:46 >>>
Dear Neil (and any other interested archaeologists),
Looking at this issue from a slightly different angle...in an almost ideal
world, what type and form of records would you like to be able to access,
and within what timescale, in order to help you to do your job? Would you
prefer someone else to deal with the data once you've done the writing up?
Janet Davis
----- Original Message -----
From: Neil Campling <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Monday, January 29, 2001 9:26 AM
Subject: Re: Data Practice Standards


Dear All,

Again, this is an argument for a data mangement system, not total
collection.
Cheers, Neil


>>> [log in to unmask] 27/01/2001 15:20:03 >>>
Diana Briscoe has given a classic example of how ideas of what needs to be
kept can change over a relatively short period.
I do understand the problems of simply finding time to put papers into
storage in an organised fashion. I had responsibility of looking after a
regional part of a national organisation's files and archives for several
years (and that was just part of my job). It was that experience that
convinced me that records need to be available in a more readily accessible
form.
Re Neil Campling's comment: "all this talk of keeping every last bit of
information (material, written, digital, etc) about interventions is pie in
the sky.  There isn't the time or the money in all the world to store,
manage, and analyse the terabytes of info now being collected..."
The storage capacity of computers is still constantly expanding; the ability
of computers to cope with large databases increases. Research into methods
of how to store and retrieve information effectively and efficiently
continue. The results of such research will, hopefully, make it easier for
archaeologists to find quickly very specific and relevant information.
Janet Davis


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