Zprávy památkové péče 2018, 78(1):45-53 | DOI: 10.56112/zpp.2018.1.08

Publication of data from archaeological archives - situations in some EU countries. Where do we come from and where we are heading?

Olga Lečbychová, Zdenka Kosarová

ARÚB AV ČR

In 1989, Czech (resp. Czechoslovak) society experienced a change in its political system and a return to democracy. We did not use computers or mobile phones at the time, and Czechoslovakia was not connected to the Internet. The revolutionary social change has allowed us free access to information and, among other things, to technological developments that have begun to increasingly accelerate.
The digital age brought new possibilities and means for communicating and working. Digital documents began to emerge, and of course so did the need to process and store this massive data. A major challenge in the field was, in particular, the subsequent development of tools that helped to evaluate these data (e.g. using databases, statistical methods, geographic information systems). After 2000, Digital Humanities was founded as a separate branch of science, dealing with the application of computer science in the humanities. A crucial milestone for providing and sharing data was the connection to the Internet (in Czechoslovakia in 1992). Along with computerization, this meant two major innovations in methods and quantities of how to work with the information. In practice, this has enabled work with large volumes of data, linking information, and a way to provide data to an unlimited number of users.
Former reservations in providing expert data to the public were largely based on fear of misuse of this information and the need to protect archaeological heritage. Over the past two decades, this concern has progressed especially in association with the mass spread of metal detectors.
Providing open scientific information to the public is not only a trend; it is increasingly seen as a duty and commitment of the scientific community, supported by public sources, towards the public. The archaeological community must count on the fact that, particularly with publicly funded research, after some time it will be pressured to process its results for the publication of data. It is essential to take a stand on this issue.
We decided to investigate the level of accessibility to data from archaeological research and the settings of user access and rights in the individual countries of the European Union. We addressed 25 countries of the European Union, from which we received 16 responses: England, Bulgaria, Denmark, Estonia, Finland, France, the Netherlands, Hungary, Poland, Portugal, Austria, Germany (Saxony and Baden-Wuerttemberg), Slovakia, Sweden, and Switzerland (Basel-Stadt canton). The situation in these individual countries is briefly compared to the situation in the Czech Republic.
We asked the archeologists of the responsible institutions the following six questions:
1) How do you define the circle of archaeological archive users in your country?
2) To what extent are data published to individual user groups?
3) How are data available to individual users - presented, or in electronic form?
4) Is there a deliberate policy of non-disclosure of certain data to the public due to site protection?
5) Are the deadlines for preparing and publishing finding reports/ archival documentation specified by a legal provision? Additionally, does the archaeological community have binding agreements, recommending provision, or a code of ethics that specifies the time limits for preparing and publishing finding reports/archival documentation?
6) Who finances the operation of the central archaeological archive?
Although we did not receive a response from all the countries addressed, we could compare 15 archeological archive systems (we did not include Poland, since it is the subject of a separate article in this issue) that provided diverse approaches to the management and provision of information in the field of archeology. These approaches can be simply divided into three groups:
1. states that use online information systems and provide information to everyone (England, Scotland, Finland, Sweden, Denmark);
2. states that use online information systems and provide information based on user group membership (Bavaria, the Netherlands, Portugal, Hungary, France, Estonia);
3. states that use internal systems or databases and make information available by individual request (Bulgaria, Austria, Swiss canton Basel-Stadt, Slovakia, Baden-Württemberg, Saxony).
This situation reflects the current state of access to the use of modern information technologies as well as to the disclosure of information in archeology in general. Information technology has indeed been booming, but it is clear here that a universal standard for processing information in the field of scientific infrastructure does not exist. This may be due to the lack of financial support by individual states, or to the existence of several individual approaches to the issue within a single state that consists of several completely or partially autonomous units (cantons in Switzerland, or states in Germany), or because of hitherto little pressure from users or superior authorities for such a method of information disclosure. On the other hand, we can see that digital documentation has already pushed out its analogue predecessors in all the countries surveyed, but it is not the case that they would be managed using sophisticated information systems and available on-line. How long can such a fragmented state last? This likely depends on what kind of support the European Union will provide for the development of open digital science and the scientific infrastructure (and this is currently important), and how flexible the EU countries will be in their response to such challenges. This will undoubtedly affect their competitiveness in the field of science and research.

Keywords: archeology, archives, scientific infrastructure, presentation of science

Published: March 1, 2018  Show citation