Special Interest Group (3-5 pages) Grey Literature. 1) "State of the art" abstract: Introduction of the theme and main focus areas of the SIG

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1 Special Interest Group (3-5 pages) Grey Literature 1) "State of the art" abstract: Introduction of the theme and main focus areas of the SIG In archaeological terms grey literature means unpublished archaeological fieldwork reports. These are generally produced as a consequence of fieldwork undertaken as part of the mitigation of commercial or public property or infrastructure development. In most cases they are the only record of the results of such fieldwork, and they have become a substitute for conventional publication. However they are strictly speaking unpublished and generally lodged as a single hard copy in the local museum, archive or planning office, with additional copies provided to the client, and retained by those undertaking the fieldwork. Access presents a significant problem in most European countries, and there is a general view that much of this important new data is not being fed back into the research cycle. In the UK, for example, it has been estimated that academic teaching and research is 10 years out of date. Although most reports are generally generated in a digital format their online distribution is patchy and fragmented at best, with one or two notable exceptions (DANS and ADS). In the UK, the value of free access to this important resource has been demonstrated recently in an impact assessment carried out at the ADS by a group of external economists. The findings of this assessment showed that not only does it provide significant economic benefit to the commercial sector; reliance on the resource has begun to change the how the sector operates. The ability to see the value of access to grey literature also motivates further deposition, and fuels a cycle of good practice which is also becoming more apparent. Bringing grey literature together with the fruits of academic research in one place also sends a message that this work is important and valued by the sector. Digital dissemination has the potential to unlock these research resources and to make them far more accessible than the conventional journal literature, particularly to those working outside a university environment. With the introduction of DOIs the grey literature also becomes as citable as conventional publications. Grey literature was specifically mentioned in the ARIADNE

2 proposal as an area of focus. 2) Partners involved (with a few lines indicating how the topic of the SIG is reflected in their own work, ADS, UK Julian Richards, julian.richards@york.ac.uk (Chair) Holly Wright, holly.wright@york.ac.uk (Secretary) The ADS hosts an online grey literature library for the UK, which currently holds 22,000 reports, and is growing at the rate of 200 per month. The reports are freely available for use in research, learning and teaching, and have been used in several major research projects. Within the Archaeotools project ADS undertook pilot work using techniques of Information Extraction to enhance the indexing of the reports. Each report is allocated a Datacite DOI under the collaboration with the British Library. ATHENA RC, Greece Costis Dallas, c.dallas@dcu.gr Despoina Tsiafaki, tsiafaki@ipet.athena-innovation.gr DCU We are particularly interested more in a specific subset of archaeological grey literature: iinformal excavation and archaeological research reports (in the form of blogs, or other digital communications), pre-publication visual material (photographic, diagrammatic, digital visualization-based) shared on the Web, archaeological reports from rescue excavation / urban archaeology / contract archaeology settings, internal communications that are shared as part of research collaboration and CRM processes. Specific topics / researcha areas we are interested in include: - Formalization, ontological modeling, metadata for such documents as reports on facts / outcomes of research, infrastructural and administrative processes, using activity-theoretical and task analysis approaches. - Genre analysis, topic classification, indexing, information extraction, summarization from such documents using NLP methods.. - Web archiving of such documents into trusted repositories, and

3 repository-based preservation and curation management of grey literature. - Approaches (methods, systems, formalisms) to support upstream ("sheer") curation of such documents. - Aggregations and "dossiers" involving grey literature. ATHENA "Athena" Research Center is collaborating with various archaeological organizations in Greece in terms of applying ICT in their sector. The RC considers Grey literature in archaeology a vast area that has actually not been dealt with in Greek research. Thus, "Athena" would be interested in: Surveying for Grey Literature in Greek archaeology, i.e. types, holders etc., Digitizing Grey literature from a Greek excavation site that would become accessible to all, Creating an inventory of online archaeological databases from Greek organizations. We think that a good source also are the - unpublished MA and PhD thesis, which deal with archaeological material written in Greek and pretty much unknown and not accessible. We would be interested in creating a list of as many as possible of them... Hella Hollander, KNAW-DANS, Netherlands hella.hollander@dans.knaw.nl The integration and accessibility of the datasets of DANS (more then 17,000 archaeological reports) stored in the online archiving system EASY. Each report has a persistent identifier (Pid). Similar challenges as the ADS has. Some excavation reports have a part which addresses specialistic research topics like dendrochronology: is it possible to connect them with the related research which is stored in the dendro repository at DANS?... UoG/South Wales/EH, UK Andreas Vlachidis, andreas.vlachidis@southwales.co.uk Keith May, Keith.may@english-heritage.org.uk

4 The Hypermedia Research Unit at University of South Wales has an interest in grey literature through its experience in the AHRC funded STAR project (Semantic Technologies for Archaeological Resources), in collaboration with English Heritage. STAR (and follow on projects) developed new methods for integrating excavation databases, vocabularies and grey literature from the ADS OASIS digital library, including natural language processing techniques to automatically generate CIDOC CRM and SKOS indexing for grey literature. We are interested in extending these techniques to other languages and investigating use cases. MNM-NÖK, Hungary Máté Stibranyi, MNM NÖK's interest in grey literatures is that we have more than a thousand complete excavation reports, many of them supplemented by scientific analyses. We would like to make these available.... AIAC Elizabeth Fentress, elizabeth.fentress@gmail.com Fasti Online holds several thousand archaeological intervention records across the Mediterranean. These records, though published online and freely available, often form the only record that an intervention occurred on a particular site. AIAC and Fasti Online are interested in ways to further the discoverability of this resource (through information extraction on summary data) and contribute to any community recommendations for working with grey literature in archaeology.... INRAP Kai Salas Rossenbach, kai.salas-rossenbach@inrap.fr Each year, Inrap produce a little less than 2000 excavation and evaluation reports. Since 2009 these reports are refered in an online catalog named Dolia. This catalog allows the description of the documents, in accordance with the standard exchange format Unimarc, and their dissemination.

5 If all the reports are gradually uploaded by Inrap personnel since July 2013, only a selection is available to the public. Today Dolia holds more than bibliographic references of reports, 500 reports available online to the public and 2200 to the Inrap personnel. The constitution of a digital collection of all reports (old and current) for dissemination now requires the establishment of a permanent archiving procedure. We are about to archive our excavation reports in PDF to CINES, a center of the Ministry of Higher Education and Research specializing in the long term preservation of digital data. You will find attached the list of metadata (according to the Dublin Core Standard) requested by the CINES. 3) Needs and challenges The working group has identified 4 challenges: (1) Collection How should we go about ensuring that grey literature reports are collected within a research infrastructure? The experience of ADS and DANS may be useful here. As many organisations digitise their backlogs of reports we need to ensure that they follow best practice guidelines in terms of digitisation and plans for access. (2) Preservation How should we ensure that the reports, and the data they contain, are preserved? There are specific aspects of digital preservation relating to reports. For example, the growing trend to embed various types of data e.g. plans, photos, tabular data, within a PDF/A file creates particular challenges for the long term sustainability of the reports. Protecting grey literature from obsolescence or loss is identified as one of the key contributions of the ARIADNE Integrated Infrastructure. (3) Access How should the ARIADNE partners seek to promote access to grey literature? How far should grey literature feature within the ARIADNE cross-search portal? (4) Indexing and interoperability Providing metadata for reports by hand is a time-consuming activity. Can techniques of Information Extraction be of assistance? (There is a crossover here to the work being undertaken within the NLP workpackage). Should ARIADNE seek to define core metadata schema for grey literature?

6 4) How ARIADNE might help address these needs and challenges Standards G2GP WP2 Access online transnational access WP11 Interoperability ARIADNE portal WP3-WP12-WP13 Indexing NLP and Linked Data WP15-WP16 Exploration of ways to index graphical elements and tabular data within Grey Lit