Bob,

As you say, cultural agents have always controlled the flow of
information. As a member of an academic institution you share the
responsibility of that institution to control information for the use
of students and researchers using your facilities. You also share
responsibility for the nature and quality of information that is
disseminated to the public through university publications etc. While
not being in a position to control, you can also make suggestions
about how the flow of raw data reaches your institution and about the
quality of that data.

Academic institutions and museums have a vested interest in
information as much of their income, and thus their ultimate survival,
derives from the sale of education and the materials for such, so
there is a conflict of interest when it comes to making that
information freely available. This also impacts very heavily on the
focus of that information. Most students do not attend universities to
achieve personal intellectual growth, they do so simply to get a well
paying job. The university, if it is to survive and prosper, has to
address this fact.

About fifteen years ago the Nickle Arts Museum at the University of
Calgary had a fully functional numismatics lab. The core of this
facility was a scanning electron microscope and related equipment and
software to perform sophisticated metallurgical analyses on ancient
coins. At that time the facility was in a position to lead the world
in such matters. As the university is located in oil capital of
Canada, it did not take long for the equipment to be appropriated by
the geology department. It was a purely financial decision, based upon
a very narrow viewpoint.

During the time when the lab was functioning, I was cataloguing the
Wallace collection of Euboian coins, as an independent scholar. This
important collection (ten times larger than the British Museum's
holdings) had been purchased by an archaeology professor with the
intention of reselling it, but he had allowed some time to be spent on
recataloguing. The curator wanted the collection to be viewed in a new
light and did not provide me with Wallace's documentation other than a
publication on one section of the collection, so I more or less had to
work from scratch, die linking the coins, and using the electron
microprobe analyses in combination with art-historical analysis to
create a chronology.

Two disasters occurred: first, the university would not pay for the
collection to be photographed, and second, the professor that owned
the collection was too impatient to make a profit to allow the work to
be completed.  

The responsibility of any archaeologist, numismatist, epigrapher,
historian, or any of the other myriad disciplines that involve the
study of the past, should really be to ensure that data is freely
available to all, regardless of academic qualifications or
affiliations. The democratization of knowledge can help ensure that
neglect for financial reasons is lessened, if not negated.

For our own part (that of my company), we are currently redesigning
the database for the Celtic Coin Index at Oxford. This will be the
culmination of the dream of Professor Sheppard Frere and Derek Allen
back in 1960 when they first started a photographic record of Celtic
coins, since then it has weathered the problems of funding and time,
and has grown, thanks to the tireless work of Philip de Jersey and
Barry Cunliffe, to records of about 30,000 coins.

We will be able to put the database on line very soon. It will be
searchable through many criteria, and it will even contain the ability
to contribute data electronically (this will be screened for accuracy
before it is fully integrated into the database). It will include all
matters of provenance, all photographs, and also the ability to have
associated finds recorded as well (this is, sadly, a rather neglected
area).

The sources of the data are museums, archaeologists, collectors,
dealers, and private individuals who might encounter a Celtic coin
while digging in their garden. The data will be used by anyone who
would wish to research Celtic coins, and will certainly be well used
by all that contribute data.

This will be the first of many similar databases that we will produce.
The next in line is one for conchologists and malacologists, and we
are building this in collaboration with researchers, collectors, and
scientists on for continents. The commercial version of the ancient
coin database, "Arethusa", will have many of the functions of the
Oxford version, but will not yet have web capabilities, although this
will be addressed in a somewhat different manner in future versions.

The important factor that is being built into the databases, is that
they will not only allow use for different levels of expertise, but
that they will help to gradually educate the users to become mindful
of increasingly sophisticated applications. They also will have the
ability to "talk" to each other to allow interdisciplinary approaches
to be taken more easily.

Proper stewardship of the past, in today's context, is more in being
able to develop the technologies for the transmission and use of data,
than in any narrow focus of specific disciplines. This will help
ensure that economic matters do not have the power of life and death
over subjects.

Regards,

John Hooker 


Robert Jeske wrote:
> 
> Gerry:
> The simple answer is no one controls history. However, cultural agents have *always* controlled the
> flow of information--from the people and places considered important enough to be commemorated by rock
> art painters, storytellers, poets, and singers in non-literate societies to government censorship,
> corporate sponsorship of research, academic self-selection, 'the market' for books, movies, etc. in
> modern nation states.
> 
> All of us, collectively, control information.  As a university professor I contribute to the
> distribution of information about the past to hundreds of students each year.  It's not a matter of who
> should--it is a matter of how should I (and others in similar situations)  control that flow of
> information.  The question should be (and in fact, started this thread)  how do we make decisions about
> sharing that information?  In other words, how do we act as stewards of the past?
> Bob

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