Hi all
I'm generally very much in agreement with Crispin's point here. I
suspect that the limitations of print-bound literature (space,
linearity, etc.) will see it ultimately replaced by more flexible
digital formats. General social trends suggest that it's likely to be
a question of how long this process will take rather than whether it
will happen. (For the horrified, no doubt a vestigial printed volume
will XSLT'd, printed and filed as well ;-) ). I'm not suggesting that
there will be no editorial process but its concerns may differ
significantly from those today.
At risk of moving to the technical however (apologies Ed, I know you
want to hold that discussion tomorrow) I'd recommend strongly that the
emphasis should be on making the grey-lit-slash-data directly
available, ideally as XML (albeit with server access restrictions
where appropriate). There will be a vital need for tools and
mechanisms which can index, parse, search, browse, visualize and
analyze what will inevitably become a digital mountain, but we should
try to avoid walled gardens that require specialist technical
knowledge or software to use them. Grey literature is valuable
precisely because anyone can engage with and understand it without
additional apparatus. This would also have the additional benefit of
making persistent HTTP identifiers (URIs) easier to introduce which
are more or less fundamental to making any of the ontology/semantic
approaches mentioned machine-readable and thus viable on a large
scale.
Best
Leif
On Wed, Aug 18, 2010 at 11:35 AM, Crispin Flower <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> Hi all
> I agree with the Martin's comments and similar from other writers, and will forward some remarks I posted to Ed off-list yesterday, but with apologies that I've only had time to read a small proportion of the messages, so may be behind the curve.
> I'd ask whether the unpublished/able grey lit report is a useful thing at all here. Is it the correct target for this debate, or just a by-product of the process? Of course the report is necessary at the point in time of assessing and signing off a project, and it fulfils an essential purpose for producer/clients at that time, but for the medium and longer term, as the means of communicating the results of a project from those who undertook it (the contractor), to those who need the data both within and beyond the immediate casework scenario, it is rather inefficient. Perhaps instead of trying to promote the importance of this stuff with beefed-up technical standards etc, we could acknowledge how ephemeral it is, and find better ways of moving the real data around; we could aim for a scenario in which the grey lit thing can be dropped in the bin without loss, or perhaps retained only as part of the planning or project management history, because all the significant data it contained has been transmitted to the HER/NMR (or other accessible repository) in a more efficient manner (by digital transfer with human quality control and enhancement of indexing). We have in the UK a very strong network of organisations and professional staff positioned to do this essential human part, and this would work even better if the spadework could happen automatically, rather than them wasting time retyping stuff and piling up backlog. Then we achieve truly accessible data, without having to worry about the medium. And to see this from another angle, the grey lit report can be generated almost automatically from the tools the contractor is using to manage their data, as a glossy by-product that brings out the essentials for the primary consumers (e.g. planning archaeologists, EH project managers, etc).
> I do agree there must be standards governing what should be the output from fieldwork, and IfA is a good place for this particularly if it can truly encompass build heritage recording. But for making the primary data available where it's needed, I think it may be more useful to improve direct data transfer mechanisms between HERs and fieldworkers (in both directions). Incidentally, I don't know if anyone has mentioned the Scottish "ASPIRE" project, which aims to do precisely this. I'm note sure new standards are needed here, just new tools (after all the data content is all covered by MIDAS isn't it?).
> And then keep up the progress on getting all HERs online and cross-searchable (which has come on in leaps and bounds recently).
> Yours
> Crispin
>
>
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: The Forum for Information Standards in Heritage (FISH) [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Martin Locock
> Sent: 18 August 2010 10:00
> To: [log in to unmask]
> Subject: Re: [FISH] HEGEL - access and standards
>
> There has been some overlap in the discussions between metadata about
> grey literature (for cross-searching etc) and data: the bulk of GL
> contents is data, not metadata.
>
> For metadata we can fairly freely identify elements that might promote
> searchability and re-use, but for data, we must accept that the prime
> determinant of a project report contents will be the *project's* purpose
> not the *report's.*
>
> One concern I would have from the GLADE user comments is that they
> assume that searching a corpus of grey literature is the best way to
> find out about archaeological data. We should, I hope, recognise that
> this is a workaround arising from the ease with which GL can be added to
> OASIS. In the long term, the best way to find archaeological data
> should be by examining the structured, consistent and validated data
> sets comprising the HERs, online or not. If there is currently a
> problem that needs fixing, I would say the problem is that HERs have
> backlogs of published and unpublished sources which have not been
> analysed and added to the record, of which GL is only a subset, if the
> most visible. Therefore we should be looking to HERs to tell us what
> *they* find most troublesome about current GL reports.
>
>
> Martin
>
>
>
>
> --
> Martin Locock
> Rheolwr Cymorth y Project Project Support Manager
>
> Llyfrgell Genedlaethol Cymru National Library of Wales
> [log in to unmask] Ffôn / Phone 01970 632885
>
> Un o lyfrgelloedd mawr y byd One of the great libraries of the world
> http://www.llgc.org.uk/
>
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