Issue 111

Mar / Apr 2010

Contents

news

New centre for Stonehenge – if drivers agree

British archaeologists help record Armenian rock art

Geophysics finds encourage new look at Stanton Drew

Dramatic rock art discovery in Swaledale

in the press

in brief & phase 2

features

The Future of our Past (not online)

In the run-up to the General Election, the parties give their views on heritage

410–2010: Rome and Britain

Introducing the events and issues commemmorating 1600 years since the end of the Romans in Britain

THE BIG DIG: Barcombe Roman Villa

What was it like to live in rural Roman Britain? Report on 11 seasons of fieldwork at the villa and bath house

Polynomial texture mapping for archaeologists (not online)

A new imaging technique is relatively easy and cheap to operate, yet has enormous possibilities in archaeology

Introducing Stonehedge and other curious earthworks

Stonehenge is the focus of unprecedented research. Yet the site was last surveyed in 1919, until now...

Remembering Fromelles

One of the most pointless battles of the First World War, with great loss of life, occurred at Fromelles in northern France. Only now are some of the dead being honoured with individual graves

on the web

Caroline Wickham-Jones looks at e-material

Adrian Green describes the new website for Salisbury Museum

science

Sebastian Payne considers the remarkable potential of hammerscale for understanding the work of iron smiths

requiem

A tribute to some of the archaeologists and lovers of antiquity who died in 2009

letters

your views and responses

CBA Correspondent

Mike Heyworth considers the thorny issues of treasure and responsible detecting

ISSN 1357-4442

Editor Mike Pitts

on the web

Avoiding the paper pile-up

Online texts were once introductions and backup for the real thing in print. Now a wealth of original e-material is also easily accessible, says Caroline Wickham-Jones.

The internet has not killed off books. It has, however, introduced the virtual publication. While most of us have yet to adopt a personal avatar, few have not tested the world of online publications. Whether we have looked up map extracts on the Ordnance Survey; browsed the records of English Heritage and RCAHMS; or searched the contents of the Megalithic Portal: we go to the internet for written information.

There are journals that exist only in the ether. Examples are Scottish Archaeological Internet Reports (SAIR), now with respectable back catalogue and easier browsing, and Digressus – a fully-refereed online journal of classical and Byzantine studies. Both are free (important if you lack an institutional affiliation), as is Past Horizons, styled as a popular magazine.

Others add value to paper. Our host, British Archaeology, offers selected free online content to all back issues. Antiquity has a free bulletin with book reviews, obituaries and a project gallery (full content available by subscription). Free online reviews and news are offered by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland and The Prehistoric Society, and the Society of Antiquaries of London features obituaries.

Others provide rapid access to original material that might not make a full journal, descendants of the old fashioned newsletter and much more versatile: Mesolithic Miscellany and Assemblage show what can be done.

The Archaeology Data Service (ADS) has tackled access to unpublished (or unpublishable) material through their grey literature library. They also offer back numbers of several major journals such as the Proceedings of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland (to 2002). And ADS hosts Archway: a new facility that allows you to locate over 2,000 journals and search article titles.

What promises to become a valuable resource is the Council for British Archaeology's new Archlib service. Here you can search the contents of regional journals (currently 70 volumes from 11 societies) and download bought or free articles.

Some free content is more specialised. The Institute for Archaeologists (IfA) provides guidelines and advice on professional standards. African Diaspora Archaeology Network and the Cave Archaeology and Palaeontology Research Network (CAPRA) pursue their chosen themes.

Those with the money, and the inclination to pay, have even more online choice. Internet Archaeology, the original online journal, is still, happily, going strong (£39.50/volume, £12.50/article) and has inspired a host of other titles. Few are entirely web-based: most have hedged their bets with a combination of printed and electronic versions, such as the many Maney journals. Confusingly, electronic content is sometimes only available through institutions.

Quality control is an issue with online publication. While many publications are assiduously refereed (Before Farming), others are not (Wikipedia). Academic content blurs into popular. How to distinguish? Gone are the days when it was possible to know the sources of all the data that one might need. Help is at hand through guides and listings, not least that provided by the CBA guide to Archaeology Online journals and magazines – by which it really means journals and magazines with a website.

Caroline Wickham-Jones teaches archaeology at the University of Aberdeen

Reading on the web

• Scottish Archaeological Internet Reports – www.sair.org.uk
  • Hard for a Scot not to be biased, but unbeatable for scope and versatility
• Archway – ads.ahds.ac.uk/catalogue/ARCHway.html
  • Set to become one of the most used pages on academics' browsers
• Assemblage – assemblage.group.shef.ac.uk
  • Varied content proves you do not have to be a professional to look like one
• Antiquity – www.antiquity.ac.uk
  • As found on all self-respecting archaeologists' shelves
• Past Horizons – www.pasthorizons.com/magazine
  • Can be slow to download (due to high-quality Flash-based interface) but retro look hides some interesting reading

A new website for Salisbury's museum

The Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum was founded in 1860, and occupies a medieval building facing the cathedral. But it moves with the times, as Adrian Green describes.

The introduction of a new logo for Salisbury Museum in 2008 prompted us to look at the design and content of our website. The previous site, designed five years ago, was clearly showing its age. The home page was static and did not provide an instant overview of all the services that the museum offers – it was not an effective shop window that sold the museum to potential visitors.

The most important issue was that we did not have control of the old website. It had a custom-made content management system. This was good for uploading news, events and information about our collections. However, if we wanted to make any changes to page layouts, or introduce new sections, we had to involve external web designers and there were the inevitable cost implications.

We thought first about potential users when planning the new website. Like most museums we would like to widen our audience base, for example by attracting local families with young children, but we also want to maintain our existing audiences, which include older generations. We wanted the website to be user-centred, so that a range of people including tourists, school teachers and local families could get the information they needed. We also wanted users to be aware of the importance of supporting the museum – through volunteering, membership, donations and legacies.

We approached four web companies to discuss how we might redesign the site. We eventually decided to work with a South African-based company called Salsanet (which relocated to Salisbury last year). What was unique about their approach was not just that they could design an attractive-looking website to meet our brief, or that the cost was reasonable: it was their use of a content management system called Joomla!.

Joomla! is an open source solution freely available on the web. This meant the content management system did not have to be built from scratch. For every component of the website, for example for the events section, news, object catalogue and online shop, Joomla! had a ready-made solution. Joomla! is also designed for people with little experience of HTML or website design, so in future it will be possible for the museum to have more control over the site's development than had been the case before.

One of our biggest challenges was creating new images. Like all museums we had plenty of digital images of our collections, but few that reflected the people-centred approach we wanted for the website. Luckily we have a museum volunteer who is a professional photographer, and was able to create images for the main sections of the site – for example a school child representing the future for the Support Us section.

The new website has now been live for a few months, and the initial feedback has been positive. There are some accessibility issues, particularly surrounding the slide show on the home page. However most have found it easy to navigate. We have also found that our online sales have increased!

We are beginning to learn that developing a new website is not a process with a fixed end point! Over the coming months we will be adding more detail to the Learning section on the different services we offer. We will also expand the Collections section; for example our Stonehenge art work collection is digitised on a gallery interactive and could be easily uploaded. Other aspects of the collection, such as our well known and published medieval collections, could also be made more widely accessible.

Finally we will be looking at how we use the site to develop our relationship with users. People can already subscribe to a newsletter with updates on news and events. We are also considering creating exclusive content on a specific part of the site for subscribers and museum members. The potential here is huge – we could, for example, have a curators' blog linked to Twitter and a specific area for user comments and enquiries. Clearly the work here has only just begun!

Adrian Green is director of the Salisbury and South Wiltshire Museum.

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