Case Studies in Open Context Data Reuse: Implications for Curation
Channel: Recording Archaeology
Date: 2019-11-23

Open Context (https://opencontext.org) provides open access publishing services for primary field data in archaeology. Since its launch in 2007, Open Context has published structured data, field notes, images and other media from over 110 projects and collections across the world. Our experiences gained over the past ten years draw on and have stimulated the growing professional acceptance of preserving and sharing archaeological data. However, even though some aspects of data management have become more routine, we still have few examples of data reuse. We define “data reuse” as any public (in publications, software, or the Web) presentation of structured data or media that references projects or collections published through Open Context. We find reuse examples through Web searches of Open Context URIs and through citation indices. Our results show different patterns of reuse. Data created and used by specialists, especially zooarchaeologists, see more reuse in peer-reviewed journal articles. Detailed data documenting individual excavations or surveys see less discussion in scholarly literature, but still some use in online media. Other data, especially inventories of archaeological sites across wide regions, become reused through incorporation into other online datasets. We hope presentation of these case studies in Open Context data reuse will help better inform data curation practices, intra- and inter-regional comparisons, information retrieval services and APIs, and other critical needs.

 (Eric Kansa, Sarah Whitcher Kansa, Federico Buccellati)