(Chairs: David BIBBY, Germany / Martin KUNA, Czech Republic )
There is no area of cultural heritage management in which archiving is not an increasingly important issue. The cataloguing of collections and resources, the storage and inventarisation of objects from archaeological excavations, handling of excavation records, both on paper and in digital form as well as the cataloguing of inventories of standing monuments such as churches and castles are just some of the issues that come to mind. Archiving though is not just a matter of collecting and storing. Decisions must be made. In a time of increasing economic pressure on storage space, for example, the question has to be asked as to whether all the objects recovered from an excavation must be retained. And if not, which should be discarded and what parameters should be used in deciding? Similar questions occur in the digitising of analogue records. One special area here is the digitisation and/or restoration of photographs and their retention in digital form. When managing the archiving of digital information such as inventory-data or excavation records, technical decisions have to be made: which data-formats? Which storage media? How can data survival and security be ensured? What are the best strategies to guarantee future access to and readability of the data? And how might the data be prepared for and made accessible to a wider authorised ‘consumer group’?
In this combined session of “Archaeology and Technologies” and “Cultural Heritage” speakers will have the opportunity both to present working solutions and to introduce new approaches showing how modern technology can help us to answer the questions asked above and generally offer solutions to solve the problems posed by archiving cultural resources in the modern world.