ARKDIS in the UK

ARKDIS project is touring this week in the UK visiting colleagues and sites in Manchester, York and Birmingham areas. The trip started from the Manchester Museum where were kindly hosted by Bryan Sitch and Campbell Price with a tour to the Archaeology and Egyptian galleries spiced with very insightful reflections on the process of creating the current exhibitions and work for increasing both digital and non-digital engagement with the collections using a broad range of different approaches. The fundamental questions were and still are how to communicate with the public, how make the interactions 'natural' and engage the visitors beyond superficial admiration of objects.

Public access to results of federally funded research - an American perspective on a transnational issue

What do researchers, activists and politicians mean when  advocating for "open access" or "public access" to research data and publications? Which are the information policy arguments behind the advocacy and which implications follow higher demands on openness and access to research results and data?

Friday 14th of March Clifford Lynch (ph.D, adj. prof.) held a seminar at UC Berkeley School of Information on public access of results of federally funded research. Archaeology, being one of the areas receiving substantial funding from federal government and furthermore often being conducted by, or within a context of, government departments is directly affected by the policy development on "openness".

In his talk Lynch pointed to several of the complexities in and due to the current policy development, such as the lack of sufficiently developed storage solutions and data management plans - a lot of actors wants openness and access, but not as many wants to set up sufficient management systems. Moreover as is clear within archaeology, the information policy and related practices are international challenges circumscribed by national policy and administrative constraints.

Further reading by Clifford Lynch on the challenges in the curation of scholarly data.