Internet Archaeology. Internet Archaeology Archive: GIS and the Internet conference, December 15th, 1995, Siena

(1) Council for British Archaeology, Bowes Morrell House, 111 Walmgate, York, Y01 2UA, UK. Email: m.heyworth@dial.pipex.com

(2) Department of Archaeology, University of York, The King's Manor, York, Y01 2EP, UK. Email: jdr1@york.ac.uk

(3) The British Academy, 20-21 Cornwall Terrace, London, NW1 4QP, UK. Email: seamusr@britac.ac.uk

(4) Managing Editor, Internet Archaeology, Department of Archaeology, University of York, The King's Manor, York, Y01 2EP, UK. Email: editor@intarch.york.ac.uk

This paper describes the foundation of an international electronic journal, Internet Archaeology. The intention is that the production and dissemination of the journal will be network-based, ultimately available to all via the Internet. The journal will publish the results of archaeological research, including excavation reports (text, photographs, data, drawings, reconstructions, diagrams, interpretations), analyses of large data sets along with the data itself, visualisations, programs used to analyze data, and applications of information technology in archaeology: for example, geographical information systems and computer modelling.

Conventional publication via the printed page cannot do justice to the rich diversity of archaeological information. Electronic publication, by contrast, offers opportunities to overcome these difficulties. The journal will be fully-refereed. It will set a high academic standard. Contributions will be provided by archaeologists throughout the world, and the journal will be aimed at an international audience.

In 1993 the Higher Education Funding Councils, the bodies responsible for funding universities in the United Kingdom, published a review of libraries and related provision in higher education in the UK, chaired by Sir Brian Follett. The review group devoted much attention to how information technology can help to meet the needs of library users and library management over the next decade. It was< particularly concerned with the spiralling costs of traditional publications, particularly periodicals, where many universities had been forced to undertake massive cuts to their subscriptions. It proposed that the funding councils should jointly invest some 20 million over three years in support of a range of activities to further the development of the electronic library.

The Follett Implementation Group on Information Technology (FIGIT) was established to manage the implementation of many of these recommendations. One of the programme areas was electronic journals, where FIGIT agreed to fund a number of initiatives to improve the status and acceptibility of electronic journals, and the promotion of new forms of electronic journals and opportunities for parallel publishing.

Drs Heyworth, Richards and Ross initially expressed an interest in establishing an electronic journal for archaeology and following an apparently successful presentation in February 1995 to the Electronic Journals Working Group were invited to submit a formal proposal for funding, which was successful.

The bid was led by the Council for British Archaeology (CBA) in close collaboration with the British Academy and the University of York as well as several other UK universities. The University of York is the host for the project and the Managing Editor, Dr Alan Vince, is based in the University's Department of Archaeology. Internet Archaeology is available via a network server linked to the University campus computer network.

The CBA is the publisher of the journal. The Council was founded in 1944 and is both an educational charity and a company limited by guarantee. It is primarily a liaison body made up of over 400 archaeological organisations and 2,800 individual members. It works to advance the study and care of Britain's historic environment, and to improve public awareness of Britain's past. Three of its focal areas of activity are education, information and publication.

The British Academy, founded in 1901, is a learned society, which has responsibility by Royal Charter for promoting advanced work in all the humane disciplines. Among these is archaeology. It has supported much archaeological fieldwork, publications of archaeological research including study of archaeological collections and excavation reports, and supports Schools and Institutes abroad.

The other consortium members are all UK universities with major archaeology departments (Durham, Glasgow, Oxford and Southampton).

The project is managed by a Steering Committee under the Chairmanship of Professor Barry Cunliffe of the University of Oxford. A charitable trust is being established to own the journal with the members of the Steering Committee as the trustees.

An Editorial Board, also chaired by Professor Cunliffe, and a Technical Panel, chaired by Dr Julian Richards of the University of York, advise the Steering Committee. The consortium members will contribute the specific expertise of individuals from within their archaeology departments to both the Editorial Board and Technical Panel.

Archaeology is a particularly appropriate subject to promote the use of electronic media as it is multidisciplinary, with a wide variety of data types. Much archaeological work is by its very nature destructive - it is only possible to excavate a site once - and archaeologists therefore need access to primary data in order to repeat and test conclusions, and reanalyse data to apply alternative hypotheses. New computer tools are being developed to allow archaeologists to make statements about the data they collect which were not previously possible. Traditional methods of publication cannot provide the functionality that these new methods and data types require.

Internet Archaeology will allow archaeologists to distribute full excavation data, in addition to their interpretations, allowing other researchers to reanalyse the material to confirm conclusions or to draw new conclusions. It will also be possible to distribute photographs, drawings, and dynamic reconstruction images, together with the computer programs that were used to analyze the data; and this is particularly important where the analytic programs hide hypotheses that might have influenced the analysis of the data.

Electronic publication offers new possibilities for the display and interpretation of archaeological data that is not possible through conventional publication. However, there is some need for culture change if electronic journals are to become common. Difficulties include: problems with refereeing and guaranteeing quality; lack of standards governing the citation of electronic publications; the fact that electronic documents appear to have an ephemeral character; difficulties of access; fundamental questions in the minds of academics on what constitutes a publication and what it means to be published; and that electronic publications cannot be accessed without other hardware and software.

This electronic journal will gradually help to break down barriers to these new approaches. Three factors will cause this change. The first will come about naturally and results from the general availability of computing equipment, software, and wider access to electronic resources. The concomitant collapse of psychological barriers to digitised information will take place as more people realise that, with electronic resources, it is possible to do things with the sources that could never be done with their printed counterparts. The second factor has to do with guaranteeing quality. Journals with poor quality content have no financial viability, whether stored in print or available via the networks. An academic refereeing process is required to make certain that digitally distributed scholarly articles achieve the same standards of excellence found in their printed counterparts. Third, many objections to electronic publication are disappearing as publishing houses add electronic imprints and series to their lists. There is a fear, and one that probably has a great deal of justification, that publishing electronic material will lead to the scholarship being marginalised by colleagues. Internet Archaeology will aim to make certain that this does not happen because it will be both refereed and sponsored by the UK's premier learned society for the humanities and social sciences, the British Academy. We aim to ensure that electronic imprints are accorded the same scholarly recognition as any print journal. Already there are signs of this culture change as in the UK Higher Education 1996 Research Assessment Exercise the assessors have agreed that electronic publications will be graded no differently from publications on paper.

Internet Archaeology will present its material in four sections: (1) general articles on archaeological issues whether theoretical, methodological or analytical studies; (2) excavation reports and finds studies; (3) the application of new techniques, such as software tools or the application of visual methods to archaeological analysis; and (4) reviews of technological applications such as databases and other services available on the network.

The editorial policy of the journal has now been defined so as to include maximum geographical and chronological scope. Part of the importance of archaeological research is that it allows us to examine the relationships between the material culture and development of societies separated in time and space. Internet Archaeology therefore has no geographical limits but will accept papers from all continents and countries. It will contain clickable maps as well as a text-based index to allow papers to be retrieved by region.

Archaeology is also the study of human interaction with the environment and material culture through time. Internet Archaeology will therefore accept papers covering any time period from the appearance of hominids through to studies of contemporary use of material culture. Papers will be retrievable by period using a time line.

Providing that a suitably-qualified referee and sub-editor can be found, Internet Archaeology will publish papers in any language capable of being transmitted through the World Wide Web. The journal will also accept papers of any length, from short notes through to substantial monograph-sized reports. Peer review will, however, curb any tendency towards verbosity or repetition. There is no excuse for repeating points in a hypertext document since reference backwards and forwards between texts is a fundamental advantage of the medium.

Full bibliographic references will be stored centrally for each issue. It is the author's responsibility to submit the bibliographic details of each reference but Internet Archaeology will enter this data into a bibliographic database. References to other electronic journals should consist of the full URL of

Much archaeological data is most economically stored and presented in the form of a database and the journal will use software to allow databases to be queried from within a paper. Internet Archaeology expects contributors to have deposited copies of their electronic data in appropriate archives but where no such repository exists the journal will maintain a database which it will make available on demand to subscribers for the purposes of academic research.

Internet Archaeology has no desire to compete with paper-based publications and recognises that traditional books and journals are easier to read, more portable and, at present, more easy to curate than electronic publications. The advantages of electronic publication are that there is less restriction on size for its own sake, more possibilities for indexing and retrieval than in a paper publication and almost instantaneous cross-referencing from one document to another. The journal will therefore not be simply an electronic document delivery service, although we recogise that such services have a function within paper publication, but will endeavour to add value to the printed page through a system of joint publication. We will therefore publish expanded and cross-referenced versions of printed works. We are particularly keen to encourage collaboration with print publishers and will consider joint publication agreements whereby selected papers within printed journals are published in more detail in Internet Archaeology.

We realise that for many users of the Internet images are merely a hindrance to downloading the text whilst for those using wide band-width the range of graphical images on the WWW is one of its main attractions. Unless the paper is specifically concerned with images, we expect papers to be intelligible without images and for large images we will provide the option of viewing the image as a small "thumb-nail" sketch as well as the full image. A small number of papers will, however, be encouraged to use graphics heavily, for example VR reconstructions, catalogues of artefacts, papers on GIS systems and so on. Internet Archaeology will maintain a balance between text and image within each issue.

All contributions will be refereed in a two-stage process, all undertaken electronically via the network, based on concept refereeing and product refereeing. Initial concept refereeing will be undertaken by the editorial board, together with external referees where appropriate, who will firstly assess the academic quality of the proposal, followed by the potential of a contribution for its suitability to be published in the journal and the validation of the underlying resources that will be required. Contributions will be selected on their merits for electronic dissemination and their potential to make full use of the new media, as well as on traditional scholarly factors. The editorial board will also need to ensure that each issue of the journal is balanced, particularly in view of the varying quantity of production work to be undertaken by the Managing Editor that will be required for the different articles. Once a contribution has been provisionally accepted for publication then contact will be established between the Managing Editor and the contributor to work together to produce the final electronic article. It is assumed that in the early stages of the journal there will need to be significant input from the Managing Editor to prepare material for publication; however, as archaeologists become more familiar with electronic publication and the advantages it offers we assume that less work will be required to rework submitted material. The product refereeing will be managed by the Managing Editor, and must be undertaken over the network to allow referees to evaluate the contribution as it will be viewed by users, to ensure quality in content and delivery effectiveness.

By defining the needs of archaeological publications as multimedia-based, and the goal of the journal to deliver multimedia information, it is clear that the delivery tools must be both capable of displaying this kind of material and of running in a client-server environment. Several other characteristics are also essential: the interface model must be reusable and tools widely applicable; where possible based on currently available network access and retrieval software (such as WWW browsers); be capable of accessing and running other software packages, of displaying still and moving images, data, and text and its use must put minimal financial and training overheads onto the journal reader; no substantial development and deployment costs must be borne by the journal.

The interface required shapes our approach to the rest of the software. Four categories of software are involved: (1) the software the user will run to access the journal (described above), (2) the software to create the HTML marked-up journal (eg query forms, links between data, charts, etc), (3) the application programs for interfacing between the Web forms or reports and the databases or other information services which lie behind them, and (4) the Web server program. Users should use WWW client software: either public domain versions such as Mosaic or a commercial version such as Netscape. The users will also need to use viewers for images, charts and graphical representations. Once again these will be public domain tools wherever possible. This constrains the server technology to a Web application - the WN server software is being used initially. However, for the development of the journal articles it will be helpful if the Managing Editor has access to layout and design software that will ease the production of multimedia networked applications. The project uses Silicon Graphics WebForce software for the development of the journal front-end. Although we are generally avoiding using bespoke or commercially developed software, WebForce has a rich set of tools to aid the implementation of Web-based articles such as those required for HTML mark-up.

Between the Web server technology and the application databases, spreadsheets, information, or software, we will need programs which take input from the reader and translate it into a query or request which can be used by the appropriate software as the basis of queries. When the result is returned from the program it will need be formatted before it is passed to the Web client which made the request.

It will also be necessary to produce access control software. This may need to be a special development, although we do not believe that the software itself will be unduly complicated. What will be needed is a way to verify that readers have a legitimate right to access the journal. We are currently investigating how this might best be achieved.

All this has the caveat that we do not feel that locking Internet Archaeology into a single delivery technology would be wise. For this reason the delivery strategy will be reviewed on a regular basis. For instance it may turn out that the Portable Document Format (PDF) devloped by Adobe and accessed through Acrobat might eventually supercede HTML. Developments on this front are clearly outside the control of any individuals, being determined by market forces, and we want to be in a position to migrate to a new means of delivery, should the need arise.

The journal requires three kinds of hardware: development, delivery and reader. The development machine is a Silicon Graphics Indy which is used by the Editor to produce and test the journal. The complexity of integrating text, images, data, programmes and other digital sources requires access to a Unix workstation which has excellent visual representation tools. The work is time consuming and heavily screen based.

The project also has a Silicon Graphics Challenge which hosts the journal and provides processing power to manipulate the data which forms the foundation of each of the articles. This machine is capable of running a Web Server and a full range of database and visual representation tools. It is connected to the Internet by a high bandwidth line.

Articles and software are worked up on the development machine and periodically archived to the delivery machine. We believe that a separate project server for journal delivery is essential to provide hardware backup, and also makes access control significantly easier to manage.

The reader machines will be the standard hardware that a subscriber must have access to if he/she is to read the journal. Current thinking is that the machine must be capable of running Mosaic or Netscape and other public domain visual display tools. This suggests that a minimum of a 486 DX33-based machine with 8Mb of RAM and 20Mb of free disk space, a 24-bit graphics card with 1Mb of video memory onboard would be required to read a single article in any issue. In the short term the journal will be designed to be delivered at one of two levels, users with faster connections will be able to take the high-level version whereas those with low speed modems will only be able to take the low-level version. (A critical element in the design of the journal will be `delivery time to the user's desk' of the articles.)

The key to the long term viability of Internet Archaeology will be the choice of portable standards which will make the data and information accessible from a wide variety of hardware platforms and software packages over a long period of time. In practice this means that while each issue of the journal must appear to the reader as a coherent piece which could be read or browsed from beginning to end it must be capable of being broken up into its constituent parts for archiving. By doing this it will be possible to store the components in standard and widely used file types whether these are images, text, data, or CAD files. No files will be stored in proprietary data formats except as a last resort or where the standard has been commonly adopted. This will make it possible for Autocad file formats and Kodak's Photo-CD image definitions to be used for reconstructions or site records.

Each article will therefore consist of its Web definition, which will be accessible only as long as the current generation of HTML-based Web software is being used; the files which the user front-end accesses; and documentation which details the interrelationship between the components so that the article could be reconstructed if necessary from its parts. Where for instance an article depends upon its visual sources to make its argument details of these will need to be preserved along with a description of the hardware that is required to view the material.

We do not wish at this time to list all the standards that we will use, since to do so would preempt work which will be done by the Arts and Humanities Data Service when it is established. One of the main objectives of the Data Service will be to outline data standards that can be applied to the creation of data if it is to be stored for long periods.

Protecting the copyright of electronic journals poses major obstacles to the widespread dissemination of information through computer networks. The journal will require contributors to grant it a non-exclusive license to publish their material (including photographs and data) in electronic form. It will protect its own copyright and the intellectual property rights of its contributors by requiring users to accept licensing terms to access and use the journal. The license will govern accepted usage as well as stipulating that readers follow defined rules of citation (including author and article titles, etc).

A method of accepting the licensing terms will be provided online. The intention is to restrict the redistribution of the articles or the data included in them, but we will encourage secondary analyses of the data itself. We will encourage users to publish reinterpretations of the data disseminated with articles in the journal, and stimulate debate on interpretations both in the journal and through the associated listserver mailing list.

Copyright and intellectual property rights in the articles and data will be vigilantly protected to assure the journal a continued revenue stream from its collection of core materials. We will keep under review the possibility of using a variety of information fingerprinting techniques to make it possible for the journal to protect its material.

As mentioned previously, we are looking into ways of taking advantage of the Internet functionality to verify the rights of access of subscribers. This will be supplemented by a password protection system which is made simpler by the use of a separate network server for the journal.

The main source of income for the journal will come from `subscriptions' and other access charges. The focus will be on revenue stream diversity to ensure the maximum flexibility in charging for users and provide a sustainable long-term revenue stream for the journal.

The majority of users of the journal will pay a straightforward subscription charge to access the journal issues for a particular calendar year. There will be individual and institutional charges, with the institutional subscription based on the number of public access points within the institution. It is hoped to keep subscription charges low to maximise the subscriber base and to reduce library subscription costs. From studies of subscriber numbers to international print journals in archaeology we believe that it will be possible, within three years, to gain sufficient income to make the journal self-supporting.

Subscribers to Internet Archaeology would only have access to the issues for the year in which they subscribe, though in due course they could also purchase the rights to access issues from previous years. We plan to implement a scheme to allow free content searching of issues of the published journal. This will allow users to check whether there is any material of direct relevance to their research interests in the journal before they subscribe. We will then charge for retrieval of individual articles for a variable fee depending upon the type of article, whether access to a particular set of material requires processing on our host server, the quantity of data, and the currency of the material.

The network server which hosts the journal will also run a listserver program which will allow the journal to have a dynamic discussion list based on the journal's contents. Majordomo has been chosen as the software to run this list. Hypermail has been installed to tranlsate the archive of mail messages into HTML files, accessed by date, author, thread or subject. The listserver will encourage discussion on the academic contents of the articles, as well as providing feedback to the Steering Committee on the quality and applicability of the journal issues. By prior agreement with the authors some mail messages will be added as parmanent links to papers in the journal, thus allowing major corrections, addenda or comments to be noted permanently.

b) a detailed description of the process of establishing and managing an electronic journal

c) definition of a suite of access and navigation tools that will allow the readers to use the journal

d) a contribution to cultural change through the increased use of electronic media

Work is now underway to prepare the first edition of the journal which is planned for publication in August 1996. Offers of contributions for publication in Internet Archaeology are welcome from archaeologists worldwide.

Internet Archaeology is an open access journal based in the Department of Archaeology, University of York. Except where otherwise noted, content from this work may be used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 (CC BY) Unported licence, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided that attribution to the author(s), the title of the work, the Internet Archaeology journal and the relevant URL/DOI are given.

Terms and Conditions | Legal Statements | Privacy Policy | Cookies Policy | Citing Internet Archaeology

Internet Archaeology content is preserved for the long term with the Archaeology Data Service. Help sustain and support open access publication by donating to our Open Access Archaeology Fund.