While the “digital revolution” in archaeology holds much promise for the way we conduct and share our research, the transition to electronically enhanced research methods is much easier for newer projects that were “born digital.”  Yet at many excavations with longer histories of fieldwork, migrating older paper and film-based forms of documentation into digital formats is a much more difficult challenge.  This presentation describes the Archaeological Resource Cataloging System (ARCS), an NEH funded project that has been developed since 2010 as an open source tool to assist archaeological projects with legacy data to share the contents of their archives with researchers via the Internet. Discussion focuses on the history of the project, the resulting software and the lessons learned about “going digital” in archaeology.

Short bibliography and/or website on lecture topic:

Frey, J.M. “The ARCS Project: A ‘Middle Range’ Approach to Digitized Archaeological Records,” in Proceedings of the 10th International Congress On The Archaeology Of The Ancient Near East (Harrassowitz Verlag), forthcoming.

Frey, J.M., T.E. Gregory and L. Tzortzopoulou-Gregory. “The Archaeological Resource Cataloging System (ARCS): A Better Way of Working with Digital Archives,” Across Space and Time: Computer Applications and Quantitative Methods in Archaeology (CAA).  Proceedings of the 41st International Conference, Perth, March 25-8, edited by A. Traviglia. 2015

https://arcs.matrix.msu.edu/