I would like our conversation on
CD-ROM format and archaeological site reports
to consider information storage and query
issues rather than media presentation.
 
So I am making a comment or two....
 
I caution against embracing CD-ROM or WORM
(write once read many) technology for several reasons.
Probably the simplest is that not everyone has a
reader, and an especially good one at that.
Many CD-ROM readers are painfully slow.
They are also an inefficient way of reviewing
thick intensive literature, containing pictures, drawings,
graphs, tables, and text. The material on CD-ROM
is easily "dated" and cannot be note marked up
or appended.. I also believe browsing speed can be
inversely proportional to hyperlink structure.
The bigger the link structure the slower
the byte display rate.
 
For an example, try a CD-ROM reader
at your local public library. Down load some video
from a CD and see how many friends you
have waiting in the queue to use the machine..
I have access to one of the fastest readers
in the world and I still think this technology
is a poor tool for studying thick
description of site information.
 
CD-ROM:  Market or media friendly?
 
Even today, there are already changes in multi-media
storage, presentation and browsing
taking place in technical industries.
I won't bore you but many of these changes are
extraordinarily expensive and fast.
Those of us who remember 8 track tapes can relate..
for those who don't.. they were popular, expensive and short-lived.
They turned out to be convenient and market cheap
to reproduce compared to LP's but a poor way
to store music long term. The lesson is don't let the market
drive your media...
 
Determining the information demand for a
specific archaeological report over time
is uncertain ..
A really excellent site report
might become a bad book, and yet a sketchy preliminary report
may be truly valuable years later as the only record
of a site or excavation long gone.
 
What are the deciding factors as to what is to be
distributed on CD-ROM? Those institutions that can afford the
opportunity ? Publishers who think it will sell? What about old,
incomplete or not-so-good field reports?
 
There are other technical reasons for my caution
but I'd rather concentrate on what we need to be able to
do with report information now and for the future before we
re-format and package a portion of it for distribution.
 
How about finding out what site reports have been written?
 
Despite the National Park Service report data base
(fairly new) and some state archaeological clearing houses
that store artifacts and manuscripts, to my knowledge
there is not a national accounting of archaeological site
reports.
 
Relying on gray literature,
conference proceedings (some of them advertised only locally)
and electronic commentary IS word of mouth communication.
I think it also reflects a certain unpleasant territoriality
in our field and among our colleaques...
It is provincialism to think an archaeologist
must live in a specific area to have access to
site report data or even do meaningful research there.
 
A National Archaeological Site Report Index
 
Access to an index of archaeological reports and
archaeological knowledge is a problem we need to
address before we worry about technographying our
individual data and interpretations.
 
CD- technology is good for indexing and
abstracting information (including some multi-media),
and HTML (a subset markup language of SGML)
is quick and easy to set up for browsing and
linking index resources and information
databases.
 
There is a need for a national database of
site reports that covers academic, contract
and government fieldwork. Unfortunately, in today's
financially and politically challenged
archaeology, no one institution will probably
be able to decide on how and where a national index
is to be maintained. The answer to this quandry lies in whether or not
professional archaeolgists can agree on a plan for storing and managing
archaeological knowledge of this century for the next.
I am optimistic if we can get a meaningful national index first.
Maybe it would be as simple as an e-mail address for a start.
 
Our audiences.. for report information (a sample of them)
 
What about the audience and how it affects
how we package archaeological site report information?
Discerning the audience for this report information
and access media is a difficult question.
 
If the information is for archaeologists,
lets leverage our technology decisions toward
versatile storage and powerful query technology.
Lets store the reports on multiple WWW servers in
SGML format with a generic DTD and allow individuals to
decide on their preferred DTD (display format)..
 
We need to ask questions of these reports,
(their sections, bibliographies, time periods,
cultures, public papers,  slide collections
artifact collections, status of work up etc..) rather
than just read them on a monitor display. The query
tools already exist but searches of archaeological
knowledge can be as easy as a list of references or abstracts
Perhaps for now I'd like to see anonymous ftp
availability of postscript files over the net
for the cheapest and most efficacious solution
for technology poor archaeologists and students.
 
If the audience is legal and governmental,
(public policy driven) then we need high
level synopses and cross-topical analsyes in quick
read browser format. Information storage is a
minimal concern and high level synopses can
be updated over time.
 
If the audience is the public..
the presentation format must be
edu_tainment.. probably interactive in some way
to be market conscious/competitive. Storage is irrelevant
as the presentation is short-market-lived. No site
is a monopoly game....
 
Other Considerations.. the Publisher
 
Publishing with CD-ROM media is expensive
for a first run (creating a CD_master).
I would also suggest that publishers
are not the best resource for advise-
or helping us decide how we want our reports distributed.
They are contemporary-market-conscious whereas we are
interested in using, preserving and resuing
some of this data/information in the future.
 
Summary on what we should do with archaeological knowledge...
 
Archaeologists need to have a collective understanding
of how data is recovered as well as how it is presented
to each other and to others in the future.
And yet because we use a variety of methods
to do, record, store, and present our work we
are more divided than any other group of scientists.
 
We need to support each other more and we
need to "own" the bad field work as well as the good...
This point becomes more imperative as tight times
are coming.  As the funding well continues to dry for
our research we are all turning our attention to
previously excavated sites and incomplete reports as either
individual sources of information or unprovenienced
data as regional data deposits to answer questions.
I suspect the future of archaeology will include
many re-studies of early sites and excavations.
 
So it becomes important not how widespread our reports
are read by people on a particular media,
but how we archive and preserve and make accessible
our site reports and site data.
The decisions to store archaeological knowledge
should be guided not by the market
or current technology, but by the ways we can
know of, access, and query that data now and
in the future for archaeologists, policy makers and the public....
 
 
Matthew Emerson
 ~e