Archaeology: Hidden treasure - Grey Literature

[BAJR]

Once and now dead king surely

[Steven]

Eerm, I'm sitting looking at a planning permission which says absolutely nothing about publication in the conditions, merely 'report' (unspecified) and 'archive', and the relevant county mountie (and indeed all of the other ones I ever have dealings with) don't seem too upset by the 'if appropriate' clause in front of anything to do with publication in WSIs. I'd guess that in reality probably only about 10-20% of archaeological jobs ever get any mention in any 'publication'

Hi
The condition (if it's a model 55) should relate directly to a "written scheme of investigation approved in writing" (the WSI). It is the WSI that forms the basis for the requirement not the wording of the condition (exactly the same as landscaping or other conditions). I think you should check what your saying because "if appropriate" isn't acceptable in many counties, check out the Lincolnshire Handbook, the Somerset Handbook, the Standards for Field Archaeology in South East England, ALGAO Model Briefs and Specifications and many more. I think most counties require at least a note in the proceedings (or transactions) of local journals for limited (even negative) projects and larger articles for more interesting sites.
What counties do you work in because its pretty easy to check whether they do require it?

[Jack]

Once and now dead king surely

'..that which is not dead can eternal lie, with stranger eons even death may die'

[BAJR]

Rock ... or Dark Ctulu quotes... well got me looking up the quote! we are getting quite deep now

[Dinosaur]

How 1970s! - am sitting next to a shelf of Lovecraft but sadly don't have the time to check for you this weekend....

Steven - we're talking most/all of northern England. Hundreds of WSIs from just this one office have gone through the system over the years with the 'if appropriate' and no one has ever queried it, and I've seen plenty of WSIs from other companies using the same phrase, so appears pretty standard up here. You must benefit down south from a rather wider supply of publication outlets, even bulletins and county annual magazines up here (which are all aimed at the public/interested amateurs and hence require at least some interest value) would baulk at publishing accounts of monitoring BT augering-in holes for replacement telegraph poles, sewer collapse repairs etc, we've even done one job monitoring guys pulling out fenceposts (don't ask!) and I once had a slightly pointless day out monitoring EH screwing a sign to a modern wall (marked as such in their own guidebook plan - yes, there is a report somewhere amongst the grey literature)....sadly these days that's the sort of thing that a large proportion of the workload consists of.

As various people have pointed out above, all the info's freely available via the HERS, the main issue is really the fact that it costs money to use them, ok for commercial professionals who are using them a lot anyway (I always try to sneak the odd 'oh, while I'm here is it ok if I look at....' onto the client's budget), but a bit of a put-off for academics and the interested non-professionals. Of course, it would help if more academics actually demonstrated that they had any awareness of the grey literature in the first place - took the greatest delight several years ago in emailing a certain senior university academic a bibliography for a site that had apparently just been 'discovered' from new APs and syndicated as such across a fair number of newspapers, even worse the biblio included a published source and old HER AP plotting both from the 1980s....

[trainedchimp]

just in case anyone has a burning desire to get to read a UK thesis, try....

http://ethos.bl.uk/About.do

It's free (mostly) and pretty useful. You do need to know what or who you're looking for though.

@dinosaur - are HERs where you are really charging for academic and non-commercial research? That's shocking.

[Dinosaur]

Trainedchimp - dunno, maybe a HER-type person could comment? This laptop's got an email on it with the price list for one local HER attached, and that certainly doesn't mention any free access for academic/public access, but maybe that's just an omission?

[trowelfodder]

I do find the whole charging for the use of HERs for commercial use a bit problematic - especially in areas which have in-house planning departments (which includes all of Wales) as it does give an unfair advantage to county units which access the info for free :face-stir:

[Dinosaur]

Does make a bit of a joke of the 'in the public domain' concept!

[BAJR]

[ATTACH=CONFIG]527[/ATTACH]

This may help... it worked for me!

Plenty other Demotivator stuff available here.

http://www.despair.com/

However, I know we used to charge commercial companies for putting data dumps and HER information together, but to academic or public queries it was free.

I happen to be on the HER mailing list... I'll ask how may charge the public for access... I suspect the charges sheet you have was meant for you as a commercial person... so would not be for the public.... just a thought.