Online and In-person Professional Training for Archaeological Data Management and Digital Curation

This presentation describes a series of professional training workshops created by the Center for Digital Antiquity that are designed to introduce archaeologists to the basic aspects of managing and curating digital archaeological data. In the last quarter century, the creation and use of digital data in archaeological investigations has become routinely. Documents, images, data sets, and geospatial data in modern archaeology are now nearly always in digital formats. Research projects, CRM firms, public agencies, and individual scholars who conduct archaeological investigations use a variety of computer systems for collecting, describing, analyzing, and reporting the their data. However, the curation of these digital data once a project is completed often is overlooked as an important action and seldom treated with the same rigor as the data creation, description, and analysis. The Center for Digital Antiquity was established to improve the curation of archaeological data so that it can be more easily discovered, accessed, and reused. One of the most common challenges of carrying out this mission is the lack of understanding in the archaeological community of good digital data management and curation practices.