Glossary

All records and materials recovered during an archaeological project and identified for long-term preservation, including artefacts, ecofacts and other environmental remains, waste products, scientific samples and also written and visual documentation in paper, film and digital form (Perrin et al 2014, 20).

Any programme of work that involves the collection and/or production of information about an archaeological site, assemblage or object in any environment, including in the field, under water, at a desk or in a laboratory. Examples of an archaeological project include: intrusive projects such as excavation, field evaluation, watching brief, surface recovery and the destructive analysis of objects; non-intrusive projects such as landscape or building survey, aerial survey, remote sensing, off-site research such as desk-based assessment and the recording of objects or object assemblages (Perrin et al 2014, 20).

One product of an archaeological project will be an archaeological archive.

A collection-level metadata summary provides a useful tool to document the project details and summarise the data included in the archive. This might be required as part of the digital archive deposition process (e.g. that of the Archaeology Data Service) and could also be relevant to documentation processes for the complete archaeological project archive (eg including finds, documents and digital components).

The process of dealing with deselected material, which is straightforward with regard to digital data and should be written into the selection strategy and data management plan (DMP).

The parts of the working project archive not selected for inclusion in the archaeological archive.

These guiding principles provide a simple definition of the core principles of good data management: Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability and Reusability (FAIR).

• https://www.go-fair.org/fair-principles/

In order to be findable, your archaeological data will require a globally unique and eternally persistent identifier. In other words, a permanent ID, which will most likely be provided by the trusted digital repository.

Metadata are data about a digital resource that is stored in a structured form suitable for machine processing. It serves many purposes in long-term preservation, providing a record of activities that have been performed upon the digital material and a basis on which future decisions on preservation activities can be made, as well as supporting discovery and use.

• https://www.dpconline.org/handbook/organisational-activities/metadata-and-documentation

The form of metadata required for archive deposition may be specified by the receiving repository; for example, see ADS guidelines for depositors.
 

Data should be richly documented using metadata that meet relevant community standards and provide information about provenance. Data archives are released with a clear and transparent usage licence, so the data repository can manage reuse appropriately. Data formats should be limited to widely used and open formats, consistent with archive needs. In short, data should be easy to use and easily cited, meaning it can be easily integrated into future research.

A non-project-specific, generic methodology for selection. As such, a selection policy may inform decisions about deselected materials but should not be used to determine a project-specific selection strategy.

Formal, accessible, shared, and broadly applicable language for knowledge representation. A standard vocabulary provides a community-recognised specification that determines the precise meaning of concepts and qualities the data represents. For the archaeological sector, MIDAS Heritage provides this, which means that data is encoded using a standard which can be read on all applicable systems.