Dear all,

In response to the questions 'what is a digital archive?' and 'what
should go into them?' there are no real definitive answers or hard and
fast rules. When writing the second edition of the Excavation Archiving
Guide to Good Practice
(http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/project/goodguides/excavation/ and also available
from Oxbow in the near future) we had great debates about both of these
questions and I thought that it might be useful to give a flavour of
some of our thinking here.

1. What is a digital project archive?
When the ADS worked on the Digital Archiving Pilot Project for
Archaeological Records with English Heritage, we were faced with this
very question. The DAPPER archives contain the electronic residues of
the excavation and analytical process. Essentially we took what digital
data the two contracting units produced and also some additional
documentation in order to make the archive usable and understandable. So
with the DAPPER archives we got CAD, GIS, databases, electronic texts,
images and so on. This rather broad brush approach is also being taken
forward with other archives, for example, the Fyfield and Overton Downs
project digital archive only has digital texts as nothing else was
created in digital formats. Here we did some extra digitisation of some
site plans, artefact drawings and photographs to make the archive
useful. Although in general we would not recommend the creation of new
digital content unless it would offer significant benefits to the
archive.

I personally do not think that a catalogue entry in ArchSeach or an
OASIS record, for example, would constitute a digital archive. Such a
record can be thought of more as part of an index to the site and a
pointing tool to help potential users of the site data to locate it,
whether it be in a digital format or not. The archive starts when you
leave this index and either go to the SMR or local museum to delve into
the records and boxes or when you reach digital reports (including
watching briefs as well as complete project reports) and associated
digital data in an online archive.

2. What should go into digital project archives
This is a bit more of a complicated issue that depends upon several
factors:

* the type of project
Different types of project will obviously create different types of
archive, for example a geophysical survey can have different digital
products from a fully published excavation. This is recognised in MAP
which also recommends that archives can be created when a project does
not go beyond desk based assessment or field evaluation, at the
assessment report stage or as part of a final analysis and publication.
Essentially the same can be said for digital archives. Section 3.2 of
the Excavation Archiving Guide goes into this in much greater depth
(http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/project/goodguides/excavation/sect32.html). This
section also suggests the types of digital data that are likely to be
created at each stage and recommends that they be deposited.

* the standard working practices of the contracting unit
Again I would stress that the Excavation Archiving Guide does not seek
to be proscriptive and force units to adopt similar working practices.
Some units may use CAD for digitised site plans, others may then put
them into a GIS, while other may just use the field drawings. All that
we recommend is that if digital data is created then it should be
documented and archived. We would, however, prefer it if the data was
deposited to use in our recommended file formats.

* the specifications of those would set the project briefs
Those who set project briefs also have the opportunity to specify the
content of a digital archive. Rail Link Engineering, for example,
specified what digital content their contracting units would create down
to the level of individual fields in data bases.

Finally we come to the question, why are we doing all of this in the
first place? The necessity to archive digital data can be an extra
burden on its creators (although as our pilot projects have shown it's
not a huge burden), it does cost money (although not that much), and it
does create long-term migration issues (especially if we continue to
record and store data in proprietary formats with out documentation),
but as our survey Strategies for Digital Data
(http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/project/strategies/) illustrated this is data
that other archaeologists would like access to. So the question is do we
try and curate and make available data to which is 'born digital' anyway
and to which our community wants access or not?

Cheers,

Damian

--
Dr Damian Robinson
Collections Development Manager, Archaeology Data Service

Department of Archaeology
University of York                      e: [log in to unmask]
The King's Manor                        m: + 44 (0) 7970 862369
YO1 7EP, UK                             t: + 44 (0) 1904 433954
http://ads.ahds.ac.uk/                  f: + 44 (0) 1904 433939