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

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documents and 60 data sets 237 and plans to encompass digital data from both ongo<strong>in</strong>g research and
legacy archaeological projects, with a focus on American archaeology.
The two major goals of Digital Antiquity are to provide greater and more sophisticated access to
archaeological reports and data and to provide a preservation repository for those data (McManamon,
K<strong>in</strong>tigh, and Br<strong>in</strong> 2010). Because of the sheer volume of archaeological data and reports that are
generated every year, McManamon and K<strong>in</strong>tigh (2010) noted that many archaeologists, even those
work<strong>in</strong>g <strong>in</strong> the same field, are often unaware of important results that have already been published,
particularly because of the difficulties <strong>in</strong> both access<strong>in</strong>g and shar<strong>in</strong>g data. As with the OpenContext
project, Digital Antiquity hopes that both the availability of and simplicity of us<strong>in</strong>g tDAR will
encourage archaeologists to deposit their data and will also support broader analysis and synthesis of
archaeological data by <strong>in</strong>terested researchers.
All <strong>in</strong>formation resources that are deposited <strong>in</strong>to tDAR are documented by detailed metadata
(adm<strong>in</strong>istrative, descriptive, technical, spatial, temporal, keywords, etc.) that are provided by the user,
and such metadata can be associated with either a project or a specific digital resource (e.g., a
spreadsheet or database) (McManamon and K<strong>in</strong>tigh 2010). It is hoped that this detailed level of
metadata will both take advantage of contributors’ knowledge of their own data and assist users <strong>in</strong>
discover<strong>in</strong>g relevant resources for their own research. “Descriptive metadata are tailored to the nature
of archaeological data,” McManamon, K<strong>in</strong>tigh and Br<strong>in</strong> (2010) noted, add<strong>in</strong>g that “this metadata both
enables effective resource discovery dur<strong>in</strong>g browse and search by users and provides the detailed
semantic <strong>in</strong>formation needed to permit sensible scientific reuse of the data.”
Rather than attempt<strong>in</strong>g complete <strong>in</strong>tegration of all data sets or design<strong>in</strong>g a universal data model for
archaeology, Missy Elliott reported that the “semantic demands” of user queries are reconciled with
the semantic content of available data sets:
tDAR uses a novel strategy of query-driven, ad-hoc data <strong>in</strong>tegration <strong>in</strong> which, given a query,
the cybertools will identify relevant data sources and perform <strong>in</strong>teractive, on-the-fly metadata
match<strong>in</strong>g to align key portions of the data while reason<strong>in</strong>g with potentially <strong>in</strong>complete and
<strong>in</strong>consistent <strong>in</strong>formation (Elliott 2008).
Currently tDAR allows users to search an <strong>in</strong>itial data archive and to register and upload resources
(<strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g databases, text files, and images). While anyone may register to use tDAR, only approved
users may upload and add <strong>in</strong>formation resources. Information resources can be public or private
mak<strong>in</strong>g it possible to support different levels of access control and embargo<strong>in</strong>g. The tDAR repository
also requires detailed <strong>in</strong>formation about authorship when contribut<strong>in</strong>g resources, and the registration
agreement requires users to adhere to a set of conditions regard<strong>in</strong>g proper citation and credit
(McManamon, K<strong>in</strong>tigh, and Br<strong>in</strong> 2010). In addition, all <strong>in</strong>dividual repository data sets and documents
will soon have persistent URLs that will provide “permanent, citable, web addresses,” and whenever
content is revised all earlier content is automatically versioned (McManamon and K<strong>in</strong>tigh 2010).
tDAR currently supports the upload of a variety of data formats, <strong>in</strong>clud<strong>in</strong>g text files <strong>in</strong> ASCII or PDF,
JPEG, and TIFF images, and databases can be <strong>in</strong>gested as Access, Excel, or CSV files. All uploaded
databases are converted to a standard relational database format that will serve as the long-term format
for preservation and updat<strong>in</strong>g (Elliott 2008). While all orig<strong>in</strong>al formats are ma<strong>in</strong>ta<strong>in</strong>ed at the bit level,
237 tDAR has already been used as the data archive for an article published <strong>in</strong> Internet Archaeology
(http://<strong>in</strong>tarch.ac.uk/journal/issue28/holmberg_toc.html), and the data can be found at (http://core.tdar.org/project/4243)