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Written by Antonella D'Ascoli | |
Thursday, 08 February 2007 | |
We demand best practices in the area of transfer of rights, with the involvement of the principal players, publishers and authors, in order restore balance in the area of circulation of scientific communication in archaeology; as was investigated by the SHERPA project (SHERPA: 'Securing a Hybrid Environment for Research Preservation and Access' is a UK-based project; SHERPA is funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee, JISC, and the Consortium of Research Libraries, CURL; it is part of the JISC-funded FAIR program, Focus on Access to Institutional Resources), that drafted the SHERPA/ROMEO list (Publisher copyright policies & self-archiving). We appeal to the necessity of contributing to the drafting or the integration of a specialised classification system for the archaeological bibliography (starting from the list of subject matter in the Library of Congress), just as the ad-hoc classification systems exist for the scientific disciplines; for archaeology, a subject that is by now equipped with a complexity involving other disciplines, or rather, non-discipline, strongly cross-sectional, still afflicted by antiquarian regurgitations! In particular, we demand a more elaborate hierarchical articulation of archaeological interests, of ancient history, and of the scientific disciplines related to archaeology (specifically the new terminology and expressions, such as ‘archaeogenetics’, “archaeozoology”), in order to provide librarians and scholars in information science with more sophisticated instruments for the qualification and cataloguing of the bibliographic resources of archaeological subjects (in particular, digital resources), and classification focused on a more targeted traceability and visibility online. We maintain that it is necessary to reshape the OPAC specialists in archaeological research, in semantic and multilingual terms, also through ontological means that can capture semantic knowledge, and that implement the non-Western alphabets of Eastern European or near-Eastern languages...how much knowledge remains unknown! We maintain that it is necessary to disseminate primary data inside the hard and powerful shell of ‘metadata’, of web semantics, of ontology, through validation by the authority (public or private) that published the data, through a digital signature. This necessity, dictated by the shining development of the information society and the learning society, is generating new approaches to archaeological reasoning; the era of global communication imposes the encapsulation of primary data within ontological reasoning, in the semantic network, and the metadata framework. We demand, to that end, best practices in the production of OAI architecture aimed at the dissemination of primary data (Open Data Repository), also open to collaborative organisation, in networks, of extremely high quality data, with the primary goal of preserving valid and well-formed content, aligned with the international standards that offer the best guarantees of long-term support and development. Our colossal challenge is just beginning, more mature and aware, more sparkling than ever, by prioritising and moving these binding imperatives! |
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Last Updated ( Tuesday, 19 June 2007 ) |