9th April 2010, 10:29 AM
The whole tone of this article and others like it is very sad - if commercial archaeologists can't get support from academic archaeologists (some of whom presumably taught said commercial archaeologists as students) then what hope do we have?
When I was at university occassionally I would need to find a reference in a thing call a 'book', and it would usually involve a trip to a magical world called a 'library'. Like most magical places in fairy stories, sometimes the library would be easy to navigate and the book easy to find, and sometimes it wouldn't. Sometimes I might even have to go to another library. But that was an integral part of the learning process, it's called RESEARCH - going to find the information you need, no matter where it might be. The apparent ignorance of what an HER is among some academics is staggering - I can only assume their ivory towers are bolted shut from the outside!
Imagine an alternative world in which commercial archaeology didn't exist but to make up for it a massive amount of funding was made available to universities for research. Would we then get articles complaining about how much data was now available, and how difficult it was to get hold of because so and so's project still hadn't been published several decades later? Perhaps we would... That doesn't then address the other issues of academic 'publication' - articles placed in obscure monographs that cost ?50 and are only available in select libraries, the vast amounts of undergraduate and post-graduate research that remains in those vast tombs of grey-literature the unpublished dissertation/thesis. I would love to be able to see a few of those, but I can't because they are, in most cases, not available.
Three words: Pot - kettle - black.
When I was at university occassionally I would need to find a reference in a thing call a 'book', and it would usually involve a trip to a magical world called a 'library'. Like most magical places in fairy stories, sometimes the library would be easy to navigate and the book easy to find, and sometimes it wouldn't. Sometimes I might even have to go to another library. But that was an integral part of the learning process, it's called RESEARCH - going to find the information you need, no matter where it might be. The apparent ignorance of what an HER is among some academics is staggering - I can only assume their ivory towers are bolted shut from the outside!
Imagine an alternative world in which commercial archaeology didn't exist but to make up for it a massive amount of funding was made available to universities for research. Would we then get articles complaining about how much data was now available, and how difficult it was to get hold of because so and so's project still hadn't been published several decades later? Perhaps we would... That doesn't then address the other issues of academic 'publication' - articles placed in obscure monographs that cost ?50 and are only available in select libraries, the vast amounts of undergraduate and post-graduate research that remains in those vast tombs of grey-literature the unpublished dissertation/thesis. I would love to be able to see a few of those, but I can't because they are, in most cases, not available.
Three words: Pot - kettle - black.