13th June 2011, 06:56 PM
Marcus Brody Wrote:There was a suggestion made on another thread that all primary site archive material should be available online. While there would be issues associated with this (cost to digitise paper records, secure and long-term server space etc), this would possibly be beneficial in allowing the expertise of individual diggers to be recognised. For example, when applying for a job, you could provide the URL to the online archives of sites you'd worked on, or even to specific context sheets or plans, which would allow the prospective employer to see examples of planning, recording, interpretation etc. Indeed, depending on how these records were stored and accessed, it'd be possible to create a virtual personal archive of primary records from all the sites you'd worked on over the course of your career, by creating a portal site to combine all the records you'd created from the disparate site archives, wherever they were held.
Have you SEEN most people's context sheets? (ignoring literacy standards) - not sure how much of an employment aid they'd be! We've got a nifty little device for pdf-ing context sheets as security back-up though, quick and simple, just stick a pile in and it spits them out the other end while munching through oodles of memory on the server, even manages moderately grubby ones, so generating the data certainly isn't expensive, and of course drawings have to be scanned to be digitised, so that data already exists and usually goes off on a disk(s) with the archive