Glamorgan-Gwent Archaeological Trust wanting Vollys

[Unitof1]

trowel spade mattock long johns sandwiches biscuits jcb permatrace a couple of hours look what I have found.

[Marcus Brody]

so why dont they just digitise the grey lit......that would make it transparant easily accessioble.

Because this also costs money that they haven't got, and in any event, would just produce an 'image' of the pages of the report. In order to make it searchable, or to extract the information for addition to the HER database, they'd then have to run the page images through an optical character recognition programme. While this in itself could be a fairly automated process, so wouldn't cost much in terms of staff time, I've found that the accuracy of OCR can be highly variable - for example, certain fonts seem to cause problems, as can poor original print quantity or scanning resolution, all of which can mean that the processed text doesn't make much sense (for example, I saw OCR text of a survey where every reference to the Burn Valley had been rendered as the Bum Valley, which certainly altered the tone of the report!).

Like Wax, I have my doubts about whether this is the sort of thing that volunteers would be interested in doing - my impression is that most people who are interested in volunteering in archaeology would be looking to work on excavation, or failing that, possibly with finds. Most probably wouldn't want to spend their own time doing what would basically amount to the type of admin that they may do in their everyday jobs anyway. However, provided that the volunteers aren't being used as a substitute for qualified staff, I don't have any problem with the HER using them to do something that wouldn't otherwise be possible.

[Wax]

There are lots of ways volunteers could be utilised to enhance the HER, setting up library links for one, something that often does not get done in over worked HER set ups. What is really needed is long term volunteers who are willing to be trained to use the system properly something that would need a bit more than ten days. Whatbever way you look at it much of it is data entry, a bit of a thankless task again another reason why it does not get done.

I would like to know what they see the volunteers actually doing. Some of the best volunteers for this sort of work are people who don't have much interest in archaeology but like processing data ( there are many people who actually enjoy this) maybe they need to aim the project at non archaeologists?

[Unitof1]

friends do they still call it ocr. Every year there is more and more moore,s law. and presumably every year there are monkeys which are evolving and which might be enabled to read grey literature and put it into something called a list sorry database. In my world so blinking what.

Lets try a different angle, do they charge vat to run a HER?



(http://www.suffolk.gov.uk/assets/suffolk..._draft.pdf)

http://www.wakefieldcathedral.org.uk/?idno=1216

[Martin Locock]

Unit - where VAT is charged, the money is collected on behalf of the HMRC and sent to them. It doesn't stay in the organisation.

[Marcus Brody]

Lets try a different angle, do they charge vat to run a HER?

Let's not, as that's not the topic of this thread. If you want to discuss VAT, why not start another thread devoted to that subject, rather than trying to crowbar it into every discussion.

[Dinosaur]

many of the problems with HER data that Jack mentions in another thread are the results of ever changing staff and volunteers who perhaps do not fully understand the systems they are using

I once spent an hour and a half in horizontal rain in a large field somewhere in the Dales looking for a small 'L'-shaped earthwork plotted from APs by a work-experience student at the local HER - eventually twigged that they'd got the scale wrong by a factor of ten and the thing was actually the size of the field.... :face-crying:

[kevin wooldridge]

As most of the work done in the area covered by the GGAT HER would be work done by GGAT, why is necessary to scan grey literature? Wouldn't it be easier to just upload the original word processor/AutoCAD documents that made up the reports? I am giuessing that GGAT's archive still has the original word processor/AutoCAD documents.....

[Unitof1]

where VAT is charged, the money is collected on behalf of the HMRC and sent to them. It doesn't stay in the organisation.

understand and understand that there are different rates for different things and that you can pay multiple rates. What I would like to know is what these two units ended up collecting tax for the vat man for. Publication? See in the past there has been these statements made in memorandum of operation like THE TRUST IS ESTABLISHED IS TO ADVANCE THE EDUCATION OF THE PUBLIC IN ARCHAEOLOGY. THE MEANS BY WHICH IT MAY DO THIS INCLUDE THE UNDERTAKING OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL WORKS, THE PROVISION OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL ADVICE, THE PUBLICATION OF THE RESULTS OF SUCH WORKS, AND THE SAFE-KEEPING OF ARCHAEOLOGICAL MATERIALS AND RECORDS. and that these things were zero rated I believe. This now seems not to be the case. So for instance charging somebody to maintain a HER has that vat charge and ps I am dying to talk about the archaeologists copyright particularly in these examples where they dont seem to want to publish the grey literature to the web but get it reinterpretated by voluntiiers, is that something to do with copyright-vat?

[Marcus Brody]

I once spent an hour and a half in horizontal rain in a large field somewhere in the Dales looking for a small 'L'-shaped earthwork plotted from APs by a work-experience student at the local HER - eventually twigged that they'd got the scale wrong by a factor of ten and the thing was actually the size of the field.... :face-crying:

I've also heard a (possibly apocryphal) story about some large, circular areas left as open space in a forestry plantation, apparently to preserve archaeological features in situ. These were all very regularly-spaced, and it soon became apparent that they all coincided with the intersections of 1km grid-lines on the OS map. Turns out that the grid references for the sites had only been provided to the nearest kilometre square by the original reporter, and the forestry manager hadn't bothered to check the accuracy of the record, or indeed, to verify whether the sites were actually present at the reported locations. In this instance, it wasn't really a problem resulting from incorrect data entry at the HER, rather it was because the forestry company just relied on the unmediated data without understanding the nature of the site records, or asking an archaeologist (whether a contractor or at the HER) to look at whether the planting scheme was sensible.