Archaeology Icon Salon

A collaborative design event producing archaeology-related symbols for the public domain On May 23, the AAI will host the first-ever Archaeology Icon Salon—a facilitated design session where event participants generate icons and symbols that visually convey concepts frequently needed in archaeology. The event will inform developments to Open Context by using visual design strategies to […] Read More

Ancient World Image Bank

The ever-productive people at the Institute for the Study of the Ancient World (NYU) are continuing to add on to their Ancient World Image Bank. So far the collection contains photos from archaeological sites in Turkey, the Levant, Egypt, Greece and Italy. They chose to use Flickr instead of setting up their own database system. Maybe […] Read More

WFU Museum of Anthropology Online Artifact Database

A nice article (also available as pdf) in the news section of the recently-revamped Archaeological Institute of America website introduces the Museum of Anthropology Online Artifact Database at Wake Forest University (Winston-Salem, NC). “The Museum of Anthropology’s collections of approximately 28,000 archaeological and ethnographic objects represent ancient and contemporary traditional non-Western cultures from around the […] Read More

One Week, One Tool

The Center for History and New Media (CHNM)  at George Mason University organized One Week, One Tool. A Digital Humanities Barn Raising during the last week of July. … a unique summer institute, one that aims to teach participants how to build an open source digital tool for humanities scholarship by actually building a tool, […] Read More

Mobile learning/research user needs

Most readers of this blog are involved in some form or another in the design, editing or maintenance of web sites/pages/applications. We usually consider first of all regular users sitting behind a desktop or laptop. However, mobile devices are growing ever more capable of meaningful web surfing. The iPad is just the latest example. Mobile […] Read More

Ensuring long-term access to digital information

In the website reviews published in this blog, the  answer to the “Permanence/Archiving” question is very often unclear at best. That’s why the final report published by the Blue Ribbon Task Force on Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access, entitled Sustainable Economics for a Digital Planet. Ensuring Long-Term Access to Digital Information, is very timely. It is […] Read More

DAI Archaeological Bibliography online users’ poll

“For many years the German Archaeological Institute [Deutsches Archäologisches Institut or DAI] has been compiling the Archaeological Bibliography which has established itself as an essential research tool in the area of ancient cultures of the Mediterranean Sea. Since 2002 it has been freely available on the internet and offers a thesaurus based systematical search in […] Read More

JSTOR Auction Catalogs

JSTOR, the non-profit—but unfortunately not free for people not connected with a member university or institution—digital archive of journals and monographs from across the humanities, social sciences and sciences, has launched a new initiative: JSTOR Auction Catalogs. It is “a pilot project funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to understand how auction catalogs can […] Read More

Hedgehogs, magicians’

In October of last year, the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI) organized a forum entitled “An Age of Discovery: Distinctive Collections in the Digital Age.” The proceedings are online. You can listen to the presentations or read the papers. A few speakers included actual physical artifacts in their […] Read More