Verily VERA
This looks interesting: “The Virtual Environments for Research in Archaeology (VERA) project aims to produce a fully-fledged virtual research environment for the archaeological community. It will address user needs, enhancing the means of efficiently documenting archaeological excavation and its associated finds, and create a suitable Web portal that provides enhanced tools for the user community. VERA aims to develop […] Read MoreOpen access also means open for challenges
A recent report—thanks to Clifford Lynch via Melinda Burns—by Kathy English, The Longtail of News: To Unpublish or Not to Unpublish, draws attention to an old issue that is gaining new prominence: published content can be challenged but open-access and Google-indexed content brings even passages of material that was “obscure in practice” out into the […] Read MoreNo, not Madonna the singer
An article in the Art Newspaper caught my attention with a “case study” in user experience. A lack of familiarity with the cultural context necessitated a much more vigorous and extensive investigation of museum visitors’ response to a planned exhibit than was assumed needed. Was this an exhibit, say, on the textiles of ancient Mali? […] Read MoreGuide to researching audiences
The Strategic Content Alliance (SCA) is a British initiative aimed “to build a common information environment where users of publicly funded e-content can gain best value from the investment that has been made by reducing the barriers that currently inhibit access, use and re-use of online content.” They do a lot of interesting research but […] Read MoreGrab a Bucket! It’s Raining Data!
Do you prefer audio? or text? or pictures? No problem, the presentation I’d like to draw attention to has all three. Dorothea Salo (librarian, University of Wisconsin, Madison) spoke at the Canadian Access Conference in Sep. 30-Oct. 3, 2009, in Charlottetown, PEI, a.k.a. Access 2009. Her talk “Grab a Bucket! It’s Raining Data!” touches upon many […] Read MoreUC Berkeley Collaborative Tools Strategy
In March, the Information Services and Technology group at the University of California, Berkeley produced a report, “UC Berkeley Collaborative Tools Strategy.” It is available online together with many supporting materials. Or you can get everything all at once in pdf format. Worth a look! Read MoreSharing Archaeological Data: Part 3 – What is your Dream Tool?
Last time I stated that it is probably impossible to build a “perfect resource” for data sharing, largely because user needs and the context in which they work are so diverse. In order to find out what archaeologists want to do with primary data and how they want to interact with it, we asked them […] Read MoreSharing Archaeological Data: Part 1 – The Value of User Needs Studies
Many systems for sharing archaeological content have come on line in recent years. These systems have made tremendous innovative strides in sharing content that would otherwise be difficult to access or use. Many are meeting specific needs on a project or sub-discipline level (for example, the extensive Çatalhöyük database, which provides a wealth of context-specific […] Read More