The Anasazi Origins Project Digital Archives Initiative: Transferring a Legacy Dataset to a Living Document Using tDAR

The Anasazi Origins Project Digital Archives Initiative, funded by a Digital Antiquity grant-in- aid, is designed to ingest paper documents (site records, inventory sheet for notes, maps, publications, manuscripts, and presented papers) of the Anasazi Origins Project (AOP) Collection into the Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR), an online international digital repository. Furthermore, an electronic database of the AOP paper documents was created and organized using the Laboratory of Anthropology site record. This database is also uploaded into tDAR. This online repository has the capability to facilitate a living documents approach for future integration of other sections of the AOP collection.

The AOP Digital Initiative builds open the current efforts of the Department of Anthropology and Applied Archaeology at Eastern New Mexico University to archive and curate the AOP collection for preservation and management. This project is one of the first steps to digitize this collection for the purpose of access and dissemination for researchers. Moreover, this report can serve as a conceptual frame of reference to preserve similar collections for access and dissemination.