“As part of a Princeton archaeological expedition to Cyprus that started in 1983 I lead a small team cataloging the pottery finds – not every fragment, just those things that were sufficiently interesting or intact to qualify. But, in fact, after a few short summer seasons the pottery stores looked more like this. Wouldn’t it be nice, … to have access to related finds as well as unpublished field notes at other excavations, to collections of pottery and related works at museums and at other special collections tucked away here and there around the world. Twenty-five years later, I can say with confidence that it is easier imagined than done. … this experience helped define the goal of access to collections for me as something more comprehensive than simply access to what my undergraduate mentor used to refer to as the purple passages.  Any solutions we imagine for integrating special collections into the enterprise have to be aware that the enterprise has other interests and other collections – not all as difficult as this – but collections nevertheless that have to be part of a solution before it is meaningful for a simple archaeologist like myself.”

“There are four parts to this [Yale] project, … Technology, Data, People, and Policy.” “We discussed the incentives to explore digital asset management as a shared venture initially with the Yale University Art Gallery and with the Peabody Museum, …” “… the Center for British Art did not want to have or develop a large information technology burden …” “Let’s turn to Data. Strawberry Hill is an exhibition on the collection of Horace Walpole …” “Out of the work on the Strawberry Hill exhibition came an ideal and very extensive addition to subject indexing from the Walpole Library for all collections in the Center for British art.” “… the Walpole’s subject index … was created by Mrs. Lewis herself and not surprisingly fits hand-in-glove the knowledge domain of British art and culture.  Where else could one imagine a well-used entry like: ‘hedgehogs comma magicians’?”

“It is also useful to consider standing the usual management model on its head and then get out of the way.  The Digital Coffee group at Yale is representative of the campus.  It is self-organizing.  It reports to and is responsible to its membership.  And among its members, Digital Coffee knows everything there is to know about the production, management and dissemination of visual surrogates. They don’t need to be told what to do, just given a seat at the table.” Is it just me or did this group plagiarize the old Lucent logo? I sure always thought that one looked like a coffee stain… Anyway, Alcatel-Lucent is no longer using it so the Yale caffeine addicts probably don’t have to worry about a cease-and-desist letter…

Full Name: The British School at Rome Library and Archive Digital Collections

URL: http://www.bsrdigitalcollections.it/

Content: Photographic prints and negatives (120,000+) relating to the history of Italy and the Roman world

Authorship: Project leaders Valerie Scott and Alessandra Giovenco (both BSR); individual database entries do not have authors

entry page

Host/Maintenance: BSR; BSR; the frequency of updates is unclear

Permanence/Archiving: No information

Licensing: “All low resolution images on the BSR Library and Archive Digital Collections website may be downloaded and freely used for educational and scholarly purposes” (Reproductions page); individual entries have licensing info; there is a site copyright page explaining the different licensing formats

photographic section main page

Usefulness: Uncomplicated access to historic photographs of the art, architecture and excavated or ruined remains is very useful to show earlier or original conditions; the database coverage is of course stronger in some areas than others; esp. interesting is the documentation of the end-of-World-War-II efforts to safeguard Italian heritage by the Allies

Ease of Use: The interface is easy to grasp and one can easily locate groups and entries

Appeal: The system is well designed with a pleasant, calm layout

example of a photograph entry

Accessibility: The site is second in the results for the Google search for “British School at Rome Library and Archive Digital Collections ” and third for “BSR Library and Archive Digital Collections”; the entries, however, are not indexed by Google

Credibility: The site conveys a sober, scholarly vibe; there are plenty of references to the database all over the web; however, the phrase “British School at Rome Library and Archive Digital Collections” yields no results in Google Scholar (the simple search using all the same words has many results but hardly any relevant ones)

Reuse: Database entries can be exported in XML format

photos can be “zoomed”

Part of the BSR collection is available only through the separate URBS system (Unione Romana Biblioteche Scientifiche) shared with other foreign scholarly institutes in Rome. Funding is being sought for digitizing more materials: maps, documents, postcards, drawings, prints, paintings and manuscripts.

URBS entry page

Large institutions like museums and well funded research groups often develop their own customized systems for publishing collections online. Such customized approaches are typically out of reach for smaller organizations and individuals.

With this concern in mind, part of our user experience study has been to target individuals and small organizations to learn about their content-sharing needs and to develop tools that they can easily adopt to better expose their collections.

In our user experience workshop in January 2009, four researchers identified bodies of content they seek to share or digital tools they desire to improve communication and collaboration among their archaeological sub-disciplines. From this, we formed the Researcher-Managed Collections Working Group, aimed at determining the content-sharing, access and management needs of individual researchers who seek to share digital resources that they have collected about a specific place, region or material type.

The four projects involve zooarchaeology, microdebris, micromorphology and content from one region of northern Iraq. These resources tend to be image-heavy and the communities they serve seek both to contribute their own content and enrich the existing content through commentary. More or less, many have the goal of publishing reference collections, and this goal seems to emphasize media and discussion more than the results of data analysis (as emphasized by Open Context). They also desire simple tools for having discussions and, by involving a global community, moving toward standards or consensus in their discipline. Above all, the creators of these resources have limited funding and technical support, so the system needs to be simple and ideally, free.

Four projects are underway, and all are experiment with a combination of Omeka and Open Context. Features of this hybrid system include: multiple language capabilities, faceted browsing to expose the system’s content, citation, licensing for maximum reuse, and community input through tagging and image annotation. However, the participants have focused on different aspects of the two systems, depending on the needs of their different communities. In the upcoming working group meeting (February 26-27, 2010), participants will meet to discuss their progress, see how others have visualized content using the same tools, and define steps toward having a final product to release to their interested communities.

“Since 2005, the Center for Studies in Higher Education (CSHE), with generous funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, has been conducting research to understand the needs and practices of faculty for in-progress scholarly communication (i.e., forms of communication employed as research is being executed) as well as archival publication. The complete results of our work can be found at the Future of Scholarly Communication’sproject website. This report brings together the responses of 160 interviewees across 45, mostly elite, research institutions to closely examine scholarly needs and values in seven selected academic fields: archaeology, astrophysics, biology, economics, history, music, and political science. The report is divided into eight chapters and can be read in its entirety online (733 pages) or can be downloaded in a PDF file, as can any individual chapter.

Executive Summary

Chapter 1: Overview, Findings, and Conclusions
Chapter 2: Archaeology Case Study
Chapter 3: Astrophysics Case Study
Chapter 4: Biology Case Study
Chapter 5: Economics Case Study
Chapter 6: History Case Study
Chapter 7: Music Case Study
Chapter 8: Political Science Case Study
Relevant Literature

Full Report“

New Technology for Digitization of Ancient Objects and Documents;

Joint project of the Archaeological Computing Research Group (ACRG) and the School of Electronics and Computer Science (ECS), Southampton and the Centre for the Study of Ancient Documents (CSAD), Oxford, the Cuneiform Digital Library Initiative (CDLI), Los Angeles-Philadelphia-Oxford-Berlin, and the Electronic Text Corpus of Sumerian Literature (ETCSL), Oxford.

We are pleased to announce the award of a 12-month grant under the Arts and Humanities Research Council’s Digital Equipment and Database Enhancement for Impact (DEDEFI) scheme to develop a “Reflectance Transformation Imaging (RTI) System for Ancient Documentary Artefacts”.

The project is a collaboration between Dr. Graeme Earl (ACRG) and Dr. Kirk Martinez (ECS) of the University of Southampton, and Professor Alan Bowman and Dr Charles Crowther (CSAD) and Dr Jacob Dahl (Oriental Studies) from the University of Oxford. In the course of the next year, the team will develop two RTI systems to capture images of documentary texts and archaeological material. The partners in the project share a commitment to opening digital access to cultural heritage; results will be made publicly available through the development and use of open source software to process the outputs of the RTI systems, allowing other researchers to take advantage of the new technology.

RTI technology enables the capture of detailed surface properties from high-resolution still or video images. The RTI systems developed by the project will allow researchers to study documentary and other artefacts remotely in great detail without being restricted by fixed lighting angles. The result will be to ensure that high-quality digital versions of these materials can be consulted by scholars worldwide.

In the piloting phase of the project, RTI technology will be tested on a selection of documents including Vindolanda stilus tablets, stone inscriptions, Linear B and cuneiform tablets in the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, and cuneiform tablets in other collections across the UK. It will also include capture of a broad range of archaeological materials, focusing on a number of particularly high-impact artefacts, in order to raise the public profile of open access, and of open source-driven RTI technology. The project includes a broad range of advisors and partners from across the arts, humanities and sciences, drawn from academia, industry, local government and the third sector. In the longer term, the new digital resources that will be created will be fed into and will add value to existing digital corpora such as those managed by the Archaeology Data Service (ADS), CSAD, CDLI and ETCSL, and will contribute towards the broadest possible academic and general public access to cultural heritage collections in the UK and beyond.

(Source: Jacob Dahl via agade mailing list)

In a highly interesting article by Azhideh Moqaddam describing the recent Jiroft discoveries (”Ancient geometry and “*Proto-Iranian” scripts, South Konar Sandal mound inscriptions, Jiroft,” Fs. Kreyenbroek [2009] 53-103), the author cites (p. 54 n. 12) a page from our CDLI domain in reference to the current state of a proto-Elamite sign list.

The reader, however, will be hard-pressed to find the reference “http://cdli.ucla.edu/wiki/index.php?title=Proto-Elamite&redirect=no, p. 4” in the web. It might refer to what is currently “http://cdli.ucla.edu/wiki/doku.php/proto-elamite,” a CDLI wiki page in which Jacob Dahl offers a quick overview of the growing electronic resources for proto-Elamite research.

Since this is just one of a number of citations of CDLI URLs in recent paper publications, it may be timely to make a statement about the purpose and reliability of web resources such as ours when they are used in hard publications, in particular to underscore the distinct persistence of only three types of CDLI URLs: 1) the lead domain address itself, “http://cdli.ucla.edu/” ; 2) the journals page (http://cdli.ucla.edu/pub.html) and the individual contribution URLs of CDLJ, CDLB and CDLN ; 3) the addresses of individual cuneiform text artifacts of the form “http://cdli.ucla.edu/P115925.”

As is obvious to users, web research and communication have many strengths that slow-moving, analog resources such as bound books and journal volumes cannot match. For instance, web dissemination of information very radically expands the pool of potential readers and responders–and includes in the readership whole regions and demographics that would otherwise never be exposed to the A[rchiv] f[ür] O[rientforschung]s and C[uneiform] M[onograph]s of the Assyriological community, with their hefty price tags and often years-long production schedules, nor certainly to the raw file documentation of very dispersed artifact collections. Then too, hyperlinked resources compress to a few seconds the reference checks that otherwise occupy an afternoon, if the proofer is fortunate enough to work in Berlin, or Chicago, and these hyperlinks in academic publications, among other advantages, finally offer our footnote geniuses the opportunity to embed note in note, ad infinitum–flights of resource access that can transport established professors back to their heady days of discovery, seated at a table decked with “many a tome.”

Well developed data creation and dissemination strategies look to text and image file format standardizations that protect data from generational loss, and in open access platforms they endeavor to facilitate the harvest, aggregation and re-use of core data and their annotation by experts, thus leading to a certain “cloud security” of important data sets. But the grave problem of simple URL decay remains. This is not just a matter of this or that website leaving the internet, funding disappeared or director incapacitated; nor the rollback of data access following the activities of intellectual property demons; but perhaps more importantly it points to the inherent instability of internal pages and their content within a given domain.

CDLI is assuredly not alone in its understanding of its domain addresses as in part stable, in part unstable. There is much pressure to improve the usability of project web pages up and down the line; at the same time, everyone wants to build good research resources for long-term use. Administrators of small digital libraries know all too well how painful is the stage of converting operations to persistent, versioned data sets online–that is, at the point in the chart where the data persistence line moving up crosses the data production and improvement line moving down. This is in fact the stage where custodians of data persistence–librarians–enter our work and, by backing up archival files to versioned and permanent repositories, protect our data from ourselves and our various destinies. Thus CDLI is currently collaborating with UCLA’s Digital Library Program to enter image and text files to the so-called “archival resource keys” assigned by the California Digital Library of the University of California; such keys–unique alpha-numeric strings–establish permanent URL’s for all processed archival files associated with some discrete cuneiform text artifact. Such artifacts will continue to carry the internally generated “P numbers” that identify entries in CDLI, but will have the added protection of a state institution–the University of California–that will enjoy a longer life than most humanities projects.

We have created a convenient short URL for each cuneiform inscription in our files, for instance “http://cdli.ucla.edu/P361694” pointing to the web page documenting an Old Assyrian tablet in the recently digitized Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum collection published by M. Larsen as Old Assyrian Archives 1 (PIHANS 96; Leiden 2002) no. 51. Aside from the high domain address http://cdli.ucla.edu/ and the addresses of our online journal contributions (”http://cdli.ucla.edu/pubs/cdlj/2009/cdlj2009_007.html” will, with high certainty, always lead to R. McC. Adams, “Old Babylonian Networks of Urban Notables,” CDLJ 2009:7), these individual text addresses are the only URLs in CDLI that can be confidently cited in hard-print publications, though obviously still with less confidence than a reference to some printed resource deposited in a library. Should, one day, some other public institution agree to assume full responsibility for an ongoing CDLI, a simple redirect will care for the permanence of these current CDLI URLs found within the UCLA domain.

I personally would not, for the time being, cite in print any resource in CDLI that makes no claim to at least the level of permanency offered by the individual text addresses and the top-level links to CDLI itself, and to its online journals. All else–and this includes transliteration content–is subject to eventual renaming, decay, or, as should be clear, is a moving target with content improvements that, given our resources, cannot at present be properly time-stamped for purposes of reliable print citation.

This weekend’s meeting will focus on the diversity of interpretations when different zooarchaeologists work independently on the same dataset. The publicly available dataset of animal bone analysis from the 1972-1978 excavations at Choga Mish, Iran has been selected for this project. Each of the analysts have been given basic ground rules, but analytical methods and interpretive aims are not defined. We will compare our results, addressing both the selection and use of different methodological approaches to the data and the divergence of the three researchers’ interpretations and conclusions. Based on our different experiences working with the same dataset, we will identify the types of information that are imperative to data reuse. We will then join the three analyses and revise our methods and results to produce a collaborative interpretation of the dataset.

We expect this study to result in at least two collaborative presentations/publications, which will focus on the theoretical and practical outcomes of this study. These include “Other People’s Data: Blind Analysis and Report Writing as a Demonstration of the Imperative of Data Publication” (which will be presented at the upcoming ICAZ conference) and “New Light on Diet and Animal Use at Choga Mish, Iran: Analysis on Faunal Data from the 1961-1971 Excavations” (which we plan to make available online, linked to the original dataset). I will update this post with links to the papers as they come out.

Based on discussions and feedback in Year 1, we determined that a second large workshop would be less productive than numerous intensive focus groups. In the end, we divided the project participants into four ”focus groups” or clusters of related user communities. Individuals in each cluster identified similar needs regarding tools for collecting information, ways of communicating and tools for accomplishing their research. We are working now to develop tools that they can use to meet those needs, but also that other communities can adapt easily to their own uses.

Each focus group will provide feedback on technology developments, based on original content from within their community. They will also produce collaborative research projects that will result in print publications, data publications and conference presentations over the coming year.

Focus groups will be meeting from January – April of this year and interim results will be presented starting in March and continuing into the summer. Based on feedback from participants, tools will be refined and final results of this study will be presented in early 2011.

1. Blind Data Analysis and Report Writing Study
2. Researcher-Managed Collections Working Group
3. Large Excavation Content Working Group
4. Institutionally-Managed Collections Working Group

I will describe the work of each of these focus groups in forthcoming blog posts and will add links above as they become available.