25th February 2013, 09:42 PM
How does Unit get all that background information for his projects? After all, an awful lot of archaeology was done before HERs were there to collate grey literature (indeed there wasn't much in the past) and many older paper archives/finds have long since disappeared so the published accounts stored away safely in libraries are often the only record - and there are plenty of copies rather than the two or three (or in many cases in my experience only one or a sad gap where one once was) copies of grey lit reports - and time will tell how durable digital archives are, we certainly can't access original digital files for some of our own reports from the '90s, the current in-house digital archive consists in many cases of scans of hard copies! And on-line publishing is only as durable as the site it's published on, am forever hitting links which have expired (or are for sale, judging by one last week). Paper publication is still the way to go