Inspired by a prelimary version of Rob Ixer and Paul Duller's "Virtual
Atlas of Opaque and Ore Minerals in Their Associations", I dashed in a
proposal earlier this year to the National Science Foundation for hardware
and software to enable me to shift much of my archaeometallurgical
publishing from print to CD-ROM (or to DVD - digital video disk - which
has higher capacity). Much to my suprise the proposal was funded, so I am
now in a position to actually do some of the projects that I had proposed!
I am asking here for some advice and input on one of these, a CD-ROM atlas
of archaeological slags, refractories and other oddities (e.g. spiesses).
I have long thaought that archaeometallurgists in training (and even those
already trained) could use a color atlas of microstructures of slags,
similar in concept to Dave Scott's fine Metallography and Microsctructure
of Ancient and Historic Metals (Getty Conservation Institute, 1991). The
problem in doing this has always been the cost of the many colour prints
required in such a project. No publisher would touch such a project
without a major subsidy (Scott's book was heavily subsidized by the
Getty). The advent of CD-ROM and DVD removes this obstacle. A 650-MB
CD-ROM can hold about 125 high-resolution color images plus all the text,
tables, phase diagrams, etc that one would need. DVD can hold 1000 such
images with ease. Production costs for DVD are not yet clear, but CD-ROM
is absurdly cheap - a plant in San Diego just quoted me a figure of $1.75
apiece for a run of 1000, including packaging and paper title inserts!
I would like to get some idea of the likely interest in such a product. I
would also like to float the idea, since I have the equipment, of acting
as the editor and compiler of such a project. If there is sufficient
interest out there, perhaps we could form a small group to decide what
should be included, and then call for submissions of images and captions
for each type. The images might include photos in hand specimen and
microphotographs in transmitted and relected light. The images could be
sent as color slides for me to scan here, or as prepared specimens, since
the grant includes a hi-resolution digital microscope camera and image
processing/image archiving software. The sender would also write the
captions; we could overlay markers (arrows indicating mineral phases,
scale bars etc) on the image with a digital editing program. All images
and captions would be attributed to the senders.
Is there any interest out there in such an Atlas? Since much of the
expertise in this area is in Germany, I would particularly like to hear
the views of Herren Hauptmann, Rehren, Bachmann, Keesman, Heimann et al !
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David J Killick
Associate Professor, Department of Anthropology
University of Arizona, Tucson, AZ 85721-0030
Phone (520)621-8685; FAX 621-2088
[log in to unmask]
http://www.mse.arizona.edu/faculty/killick.html
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