Yes, I agree. We're just about to get access to remotely held digital aerial imagery from a server in Farnborough, so its entirely possible now to store local information in a central server and have access to it from every library, school and council office in the country. Rather than distributing the Portable Antiquities data to local SMRs, it should be put into Oracle on a national server and made accessible to everybody. I for one would be pleased to hand over the North Yorks SMR data to a national agency to maintain and migrate as needed, knowing that I could spend more time on actually protecting the archaeology rather than administering my own local IT set-up. University students could directly access the national data set for the information they wanted without having to go through several local councils. It is about time we thought "big".
Cheers,
Neil
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