Campers

I am currently working on a digital repository for materials relating to major Mississippian archaeological sites. My project involves the collection, digitization, and organization of materials such as maps, photographs, field notes, publications, gray literature, bibliographies, websites, and raw data within a single digital repository, which will be generally organized by site. The repository will function to preserve materials in a digital format while improving scholarly accessibility and providing an integrated, searchable network of relationships between diverse types and sets of information.

I propose that we have a session on KORA and/or other digital repository platforms. I know that Matt Geimer already posted about it, and he obviously knows what he is talking about (unlike me), but I feel like this will be a great opportunity for me to get the information I need  directly from the experts, while hopefully contributing a little something to a discussion/consideration of the ways that these repositories can help researchers from a broad range of disciplines.  As far as I know, this will be the first time that KORA has been used for an archaeology project, and I am excited to share my ideas and get feedback/advice.

Beyond the technical/organizational issues I have been working on, I am also interested in learning more about creating an outward facing website that would serve to publicize the existence of the repository among scholars and research, as well as to provide general public access to a limited amount of the materials. Although I envision the creation of some avenue for researchers to secure permission to access all materials, I anticipate that copyright, author permissions, and special issues particular to archaeological materials will likely prevent me from making the entire repository available to the public. I guess what I’m really getting at is that, in addition to the technical aspects of all this, I am also really interested in participating in a philosophical discussion of the ethics of access in the digital humanities, as a discussion of the costs and benefits of public repositories will eventually/inevitably lead to issues of ownership of intellectual property and control over cultural materials/heritage. This is the kind of stuff I really like to learn about. I’m excited. Let’s do this.