The Oxford Handbook of Museum Archaeology by Stevenson Alice;

Author:Stevenson, Alice;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press, Incorporated
Published: 2022-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

13.6 Access: Digital dissemination

The dissemination of results is a fundamental aspect of Historic England’s Management of Research Projects in the Historic Environment (Historic England 2015) whilst the documentation of museum collections is an essential element of their management. The two activities go hand in hand in enabling the visibility of archive content. Spectrum, which is the UK collection management standard, describes cataloguing as ‘managing the information that gives your collections meaning, not as an end in itself but to record and retrieve what is known about your objects’ (Collections Trust 2017). Recording different elements of an archive is however more complex than for a single object. SMA’s revised standards address many of the additional considerations relative to this process for archaeological material, including the need for terminology control (Boyle and Rawden 2020). Dealing with this complexity is being addressed by some museums using sophisticated multidisciplinary digital collections management systems (CMSs) such as EMu, MuseumIndex+, and Adlib. Nevertheless, the resource to enable this is not readily available in many museums and acts as a barrier to the efficient collation and dissemination of information about the archives they hold and therefore reduces potential. This is especially true where no platform is available for archive information to be accessed through a web interface. Similarly, although a digital CMS often enables data to be directly imported and exported, the same cannot be said of museum online catalogues, which do not enable large amounts of archive data to be downloaded in a usable form. In addition, there is currently also no platform that enables the integration and retrieval of datasets derived from multiple museum databases in the same way as, for example, Heritage Gateway (Heritage Gateway 2012). This is a website that enables the cross-searching of over 60 resources, relating to England’s heritage. The nearest museum equivalent would be a development of the Collections Trust’s CultureGrid or Europeana.eu. A simpler solution for most museums would be to provide archive information in spreadsheet format downloadable from an Open Data platform or through the Archaeology Data Service (ADS), which is ‘the longest serving repository for archaeological data in the world’ (Richards 2017: 1). A recent search of ADS project archive pages shows, however, that museums severely underutilize this resource, with less than a handful having a dedicated webpage that links them to the archives they hold, or which have been deposited digitally with ADS by commercial units. Over-reliance on collections’ online search facilities, which deliver information edited by design, masks the detailed data museums hold about archives to such an extent that these systems act as gatekeepers. Museum archaeologists should be seeking ways of democratizing the data they hold to enable its full potential: this means it must be able to be downloaded, resorted, and re-imagined.

Accessing information about archives is also made more complicated because responsibility for managing data relating to them no longer lies solely with the organization in which they have been deposited. The ADS has been setting standards for data collection and management for

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