http://finds.org.uk/blogs/centralunit/2010/05/14/access-levels-and-what-you-can-view/ Just another Portable Antiquities Scheme blogs weblog Mon, 24 Jan 2011 21:29:32 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.3 http://finds.org.uk/blogs/centralunit/2010/05/14/access-levels-and-what-you-can-view/comment-page-1/#comment-377 DART Project » Blog Archive » Guest blog for the Open Knowledge Foundation Sat, 12 Jun 2010 09:49:34 +0000 http://finds.org.uk/blogs/centralunit/?p=837#comment-377 [...] Whatever the answer the point remains: archaeologists, for right or wrong, consider the implications of placing fine grained data in the public domain and “Ethical considerations” have been identified as a “barrier” to deposition. However, there appears to be limited guidance as to how to resolve these issues. This means that many archaeologists are re-inventing the wheel. The challenge is to provide some supporting “thing” that makes it easy for individuals and organisations to get to a clear, and hopefully unambiguous, ethical position. Such a “thing” will reduce uncertainty thereby removing one of the barriers to data sharing. The current default position is the equivalent of doing nothing: surely this must change. Supporting “stuff” which is recognised and approved by national heritage organisations and standards bodies will act as important lubricant to help individuals and groups to release data through informal channels. It should be recognised that the relationship between the “citizen”, the archaeologists and heritage data will change: citizen science and citizen data, will play more of a role in heritage than ever before. Hence, a focus on the informal is important: we don’t want more grey data do we? The Portable Antiquities Scheme is the “poster boy” for archaeological approaches to citizen science – although they do have a range of different user access levels. [...] [...] Whatever the answer the point remains: archaeologists, for right or wrong, consider the implications of placing fine grained data in the public domain and “Ethical considerations” have been identified as a “barrier” to deposition. However, there appears to be limited guidance as to how to resolve these issues. This means that many archaeologists are re-inventing the wheel. The challenge is to provide some supporting “thing” that makes it easy for individuals and organisations to get to a clear, and hopefully unambiguous, ethical position. Such a “thing” will reduce uncertainty thereby removing one of the barriers to data sharing. The current default position is the equivalent of doing nothing: surely this must change. Supporting “stuff” which is recognised and approved by national heritage organisations and standards bodies will act as important lubricant to help individuals and groups to release data through informal channels. It should be recognised that the relationship between the “citizen”, the archaeologists and heritage data will change: citizen science and citizen data, will play more of a role in heritage than ever before. Hence, a focus on the informal is important: we don’t want more grey data do we? The Portable Antiquities Scheme is the “poster boy” for archaeological approaches to citizen science – although they do have a range of different user access levels. [...]

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