0.17 Sustaining digital scholarship in archaeology  (Page 2/3)

Both the Chaco Archive and DAACS have been sustained through the support of their home institutions, although there are differences in some important particulars. The Chaco Archive was developed in collaboration with IATH and thus depends upon its continuation. DAACS is part of an institution, the Thomas Jefferson Foundation, with a longer history than IATH and, significantly, has through the support of the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Jefferson Foundation been able to build an endowment that will support a full-time director of the archive for at least the foreseeable future. On the other hand, whereas it seems likely that the importance of digital scholarship in universities will only increase in the future, the significance of archaeology and digital scholarship to a more special purpose organization such as the Thomas Jefferson Foundation is harder to predict.

In archaeology, a second organizational path to sustainability has evolved, initially in European countries, based at least in part on governmental support. Perhaps the best example is the England’s Archaeological Data Service (ADS) ( (External Link) ), an organization that preserves and disseminates digital archaeological data, promotes standards and good practices, and provides technical advice. ADS archives a wide variety of materials ranging from basic texts, images, and spreadsheet to statistical (e.g., SPSS), audio, database, GIS (e.g., ESRI and ArcInfo), and virtual reality files. Although housed at the University of York, ADS was created through the collaboration of the Council for British Archaeology and several universities, and has been supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and, until a few years ago, by the Joint Information Systems Committee of the Higher Education Funding Councils for England, Scotland and Wales, and the Department of Education for Northern Ireland.

Support for ADS also is provided by a one-time archiving fee, paid by the body supporting the archaeological investigation and estimated to be between one and five percent of the total project budget. The archiving fee is dependent upon the type and abundance of files; archiving GIS files, for example, costs more than image or text files. ADS thus illustrates the possibility, and perhaps the necessity, of addressing sustainability through the collaboration of a number of institutions at both the national and regional levels, as well as the adoption of a business model that generates revenue.

In the United States, a somewhat similar effort has just been initiated with the support of the National Science Foundation, Arizona State University, and, in particular, the Andrew Mellon Foundation. In addition to preserving archaeological data, the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR) ( (External Link) ) also has a broader goal of enhancing archaeologists’ ability to pursue synthetic and comparative research. At this early stage of development, tDAR only supports a rather restricted range of digital information—Microsoft Access databases and Excel spreadsheets, reports and other documents in PDF or plain ASCII format, and images in JPG and TIFF format—but envisions broadening the scope of their efforts. Although the Mellon Foundation is supporting the creation of tDAR, after a short period tDAR will become dependent upon the support of Arizona State University and, I expect, a model comparable to ADS in which the group depositing the data must pay archiving fees. Since most archaeological fieldwork in the United States is supported directly or indirectly by federal and state institutions who require archaeological documentation as part of environmental impact statements, it seems likely that the long-term sustainability of tDAR will require that these federal and state institutions mandate the investigating groups to archive all digital information upon completion of the project.