23rd November 2013, 03:59 PM
Pity my local authority frowns on bonfires... :o)
Now that we're in the digital age, the volume of data we create is increasing exponentially - I shudder to think how we'll ever be able to store the stuff, let alone quarry it for useful nuggets! And of course there's all that misleading stuff that's been superceded by better knowledge, but hasn't been discarded because it's so easy to just get bigger storage devices. Then there's the problem of old file formats and media that go out of date. Not to mention the cost of maintaining it all on some distant server.
Perhaps the real moral of the story is that ALL excavation should be State-controlled, with ALL archives from it going to a reputable archiving facility as soon as it is created? While I applaud the pluck of the pioneers who ran one-man digs as a hobby/obsession/labour of love, it certainly did lead to lots of orphaned material in later years. We would then be forced to make a distinction between "archive" that has to be treated as State property from the get-go (and will be maintained accordingly), and "personal junk" that we can use for chip-wrappers if we so choose.
Anyway, stepping off the soap-box now...
Now that we're in the digital age, the volume of data we create is increasing exponentially - I shudder to think how we'll ever be able to store the stuff, let alone quarry it for useful nuggets! And of course there's all that misleading stuff that's been superceded by better knowledge, but hasn't been discarded because it's so easy to just get bigger storage devices. Then there's the problem of old file formats and media that go out of date. Not to mention the cost of maintaining it all on some distant server.
Perhaps the real moral of the story is that ALL excavation should be State-controlled, with ALL archives from it going to a reputable archiving facility as soon as it is created? While I applaud the pluck of the pioneers who ran one-man digs as a hobby/obsession/labour of love, it certainly did lead to lots of orphaned material in later years. We would then be forced to make a distinction between "archive" that has to be treated as State property from the get-go (and will be maintained accordingly), and "personal junk" that we can use for chip-wrappers if we so choose.
Anyway, stepping off the soap-box now...