Preserving scientific documentation of Preventive Archaeology
Channel: European Association of Archaeologists
Date: 2018-10-23

Since its creation, the French National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (Inrap) has carried out more than 2.000 preventive archaeology operations per year and produces for each archaeological operation, in addition to an operational report, a considerable amount of documents. In 2006, the Inrap’s Scientific and Technical Direction (DST) decided to organise the management of this documentation in order to allow consultation and reuse. The operation’s report has established itself as the entry point of this documentation: it’s systematically present and since 2004 its content is set by law. This corpus of documents deserved to be organized, classified and made it available. The aim was to realise a tool allowing at least the reporting, referencing and location of those documents. Several arguments prevailed in the choice of the IT solution: the necessary interoperability and the opportunity to making the document available in digital format. It has been imposed the choice of an integrated library management system, complying with the international standard UNIMARC. In order to unify the descriptions and facilitate the linking of documents, it was decided to describe their content using a controlled vocabulary: the “Pactols” thesaurus, createdby the CNRS-Frantiq network.
Thanks to this choice of a structured system complies with data exchange standards, 7 years later, Inrap was able to share more than 28.000 archaeological reports on a European archaeological data platform (ARIADNE).
The purpose of this paper is to show how the reasoned management of the operational reports has offered a framework that makes it possible to figure today the availability of all the archaeological documentation and allows a reflection on the data sharing
The work carried out within the framework of the ARIADNE project will serve as example for the implementation of an interoperability approach: mapping of data structures, alignment between different vocabularies and geocoding.

Author: Dr Nurra, Federico - INRAP - National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research (Presenting author)
Co-Author: Ms Bryas, Emmanuelle - INRAP - National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research