ARENA held a round-table session entitled 'Deploying Digital Data' at the European Association of Archaeologists (EAA) conference in 2003 held in St Petersburg. Among other issues raised at the round-table discussion was discussion about the users and their needs. The real value of digital data is in its use and continued use or re-use. To encourage this, ARENA partners have seen that it is important to publicise the the existence of these resources. Correlations were identified by the Danish and Icelandic partners between use of the ARENA archives and their promotion at conferences, seminars and workshops. Reaching critical mass is important in this context, which is a lesson learnt by the Archaeology Data Service back in 1996. This can be achieved by monitoring users through web statistics which give important information about what kind of user communities are using the resources. This will be part of a possible ARENA legacy and future cooperation between the partners.
What was apparent, besides publication and communicating the existence of the resources is that there is a direct relationship between the amount of work done to make an archive interactive and the amount of use it gets. This work, however, is not necessarily connected to the visually clever and innovative but applied to stable archives that are less dependent on proprietary software. These archives are more reliable and able to be preserved longer term. Innovations in presentation method can then be made to make the interface more appealing, but the key outcomes of the ARENA project are to enhance both long-term access and preservation of archaeological data. In conclusion, the preparation work done on archives for online presentation should be combined with ensuring long-term preservation and access to the data contained in the archives. Assessing the user communities and what they would like to see is something for the future, but with the archives now accessible online it will be possible to monitor their use in the long term and assess their needs more effectively.
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| File last updated: Mon Sep 5 2005