Summary:

ARB has written a draft follow on fund application (post DART).

Bradford will lead this application.

What is written is an appropriate foundation.

We should focus on the links between Community and archive. For many communities data itself is not the problem - the issue:

• Processing
• Visualisation
• Engagement
• Interpretation

A major issue concerns the building of cross sector 'communities of practice'

This will become exacerbated with 'big data' (a la LBI and Stonehenge). So much data.... not enough processing (or at least controlled by the elite few)

However, there is significant data leakage and if we are not careful legacy data will not exist. We need to find ways to encourage commercial units and community groups to deposit such data.

Note: the current ADS deposition policy has a fixed cost per 'project'. A single geophysics piece of fieldwork is a 'project' - hence ADS archive costs may represent a significant portion of the current tender value (of the order of 10's of percent). this is obviously impractical. This anecdotal situation needs confirming.

Concept

• Get community/business groups to deposit data within the DART framework
  • This means the data will be in archive formats and rich in metadata
  • Both data objects and integrated database
• Automatically 'deposit' this data into FigShare/Datahub using their APIs
• This can be deposited with the ADS as a single broker
  • Many people don;t deposit with the ADS because there is a fixed fee for a 'project'

Benefits for community groups

• Deposition in the repository provides access to a clear well understood 'OPEN' processing, visualisation and interpretation framework.
• The hard work of creating metadata and generating archive formats is mainly removed.
• An automated report is made and deposited through OASIS (this can become an impact metric).
• The data is deposited into an archive which is available in 'perpetuity' (whatever that means - this does not need to be ADS - thinking here of FigShare and DataHub).

Benefits for the archaeological community

• Data processing, visualisation and interpretation frameworks
• Sustainable access to legacy data
• Ability to process and access 'big data'
• Building communities of practice
• Levelling the technology playing field (increasing both capacity and capability)
• Reduced cost of archiving through economies of scale!

Benefits for the ADS

• Access to a structured and clean set of data and rich accompanying metadata
• Ability to automatically ingest (reduing costs - through SWORDARM)