Rome Wasn't Digitized in a Day - Council on Library and Information ...

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for re-use is a simple slogan, but <strong>in</strong> the digital age that plann<strong>in</strong>g has to start at the po<strong>in</strong>t of data
creation, not at the end of a project as happens with conventional archives” (Kilbride 2005). The need
to plan for digital data preservation from the beg<strong>in</strong>n<strong>in</strong>g of a project as well as for the reuse of data
were highlighted by Kilbride as essential, and he expla<strong>in</strong>ed that <strong>in</strong> the first 10 years of its existence the
ADS also developed best-practice guidel<strong>in</strong>es (e.g., for the creation of data, the deposit of data) that are
cont<strong>in</strong>uously ref<strong>in</strong>ed and well documented, built a rights-management framework, and created <strong>in</strong>itial
long-term preservation cost models. Kilbride also noted that more than 10 years of experience had
shown ADS staff how various types of digital resources were used <strong>in</strong> different ways.
The challenges of preserv<strong>in</strong>g archaeological data, both newly created digital data and analog data <strong>in</strong> a
myriad of formats, as briefly touched upon <strong>in</strong> the last section, has long been considered as a significant
problem fac<strong>in</strong>g the field with a diverse set of <strong>in</strong>frastructure challenges. The Center for the Study of
Architecture (CSA) 214 based at Bryn Mawr University led an <strong>in</strong>itiative to develop an Archaeological
Data Archive Project (ADAP) <strong>in</strong> 1993 <strong>in</strong> an effort to raise awareness regard<strong>in</strong>g data preservation and
to encourage scholars to deposit their own digital materials <strong>in</strong>to a shared data archive, but a lack of
funds limited the success of the <strong>in</strong>itiative. 215 As outl<strong>in</strong>ed by McManamon and K<strong>in</strong>tigh (2010), legacy
data <strong>in</strong>clude lengthy technical reports, grey literature, and digital data stored on computer cards,
magnetic tapes, and floppy disks found <strong>in</strong> museums, archives, and faculty offices. Most of these digital
data, the authors noted, has only been preserved <strong>in</strong> that the physical media on which it can be found is
be<strong>in</strong>g actively preserved by archaeological repositories, although this provides no means of access to
the data. 216
The challenges of complicated data, diverse standards, the difficulties of mean<strong>in</strong>gful archaeological
data <strong>in</strong>tegration, and the problems of long-term preservation were also outl<strong>in</strong>ed <strong>in</strong> a discussion of the
cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure needs of archaeology by Snow et al. (2006). They listed three particular types of
data that are almost impossible to access simultaneously because of lack of cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure for
archaeology: databases us<strong>in</strong>g different standards for both record<strong>in</strong>g and manag<strong>in</strong>g data on different
technical platforms; a large volume of “grey literature”; and images, maps, and photographs found <strong>in</strong>
museum catalogs and both published and unpublished archaeological reports. The authors proposed an
<strong>in</strong>itial cyber<strong>in</strong>frastructure architecture for archaeology that <strong>in</strong>cluded exist<strong>in</strong>g digital library middleware
(such as Fedora) 217 and content-management tools, document and image-search<strong>in</strong>g technologies,
geographic <strong>in</strong>formation systems (GIS), visualization tools, and the use of the Open Archives Initiative
Protocol for Metadata Harvest<strong>in</strong>g (OAI-PMH) 218 because it provides an “application-<strong>in</strong>dependent
<strong>in</strong>teroperability framework for metadata harvest<strong>in</strong>g” by repositories. Snow et al. (2006) reported that
such an <strong>in</strong>frastructure could be built almost entirely from open-source components.
These authors also identified several critical problems that needed to be addressed, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g the lack
of any type of standard protocols for record<strong>in</strong>g the greatly vary<strong>in</strong>g types of archaeological data and the
absence of any standardized tools for access. Nonetheless, the authors suggested that rather than try<strong>in</strong>g
to force the adoption of one data model, users should employ semantic mapp<strong>in</strong>g tools to map different
term<strong>in</strong>ologies or vocabularies <strong>in</strong> use, while also work<strong>in</strong>g with<strong>in</strong> the archaeological community to
establish at least m<strong>in</strong>imal shared standards for description. F<strong>in</strong>ally, to ensure susta<strong>in</strong>ability, Snow et al.
argued that “data collections should be distributed and sharable” and that “digital libraries and
214 http://www.csanet.org/
215 For further discussion of the ADAP and the viability of digital archives <strong>in</strong> archaeology, see (Eiteljorg 2005) and (Xia 2006).
216 The authors cite Childs and Kagan (2008) as the source for this statement.
217 Fedora is an advanced digital repository platform (http://www.fedora-commons.org/) that is available as open source.
218 http://www.openarchives.org/pmh/