Internet Archaeol. 14. Heyworth. Introduction

1. Introduction

For archaeologists who have access to the Internet it is an amazing resource. Research that would have taken years to undertake only a decade or two ago – and would have involved considerable travel and expense – can now be done without moving from your desk.

Unfortunately, the Internet has almost become too much of a good thing. How can you keep up with the amount of material that is now appearing through the Internet? The World Wide Web is a relatively passive medium; individuals usually have to make an active effort to visit web sites to catch up with new material that might be of interest (although there are free web services that will check for updates to particular web pages and send out a daily notification of any changes, for example see http://www.changenotes.com). But with so many sites of potential interest, and with so much pressure on time, it is inevitable that the vast majority of web sites will rarely be visited.

This is certainly the situation in archaeology, as in many other subjects, but possible solutions are beginning to appear which may help to keep the information flows in proportion and flag up relevant news in a more pro-active way.