Creating a Sustainable Domain Repository: tDAR (the Digital Archaeological Record)

This tDAR record contains a summary of the presentation delivered at the 2016 SciDataCon held in Denver and a copy of the PPT slides used to illustrate the presentation.

In recent decades, approximately 50,000 archaeological investigations have been conducted annually in the United States. Such field studies are required by archaeological and environmental laws and regulations. The term “cultural resource management” (CRM) describes the majority of these investigations. It is estimated that as much as $1 billion is spent annually by public agencies and private sector companies involved in CRM (Altschul and Patterson 2010:297). Most archaeological data and information from these investigations are difficult or impossible to discover and access. If the digital documents, images, and data sets from such studies are curated at all, they are deposited with the artifacts and paper records in repositories that focus on maintaining physical objects. Few existing repositories deal effectively with digital data – either to provide access or to provide long-term preservation. The media containing digital files are typically curated as if they were artifacts. The data are not maintained with adequate metadata, nor are they easily discoverable or accessible. Alternatively, the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR) provides an effective repository for the data and information from the variety of CRM activities, as well as for archaeological studies carried out by academic and museum researchers. The Center for Digital Antiquity at Arizona State University develops and maintains tDAR. Funding for the Center and tDAR derives from a mix of revenue sources. The financial challenge facing Digital Antiquity is to increase the amount of annual revenue so that the organization obtains sufficient funds for support operations and long-term preservation of its digital content.