Violetta REITER
(University of Vienna, Institute of Pre- and Early-History, Austria)
Outline: easier access to the collection for study and research, availability of data for the next 100 years.
For the last three years, there is the project “Digital archiving” at the department collection of the Institute of Pre- and Early-History at the University of Vienna. Ass. Prof. Dr. Alois Stuppner is the head of the project. The work is done by 15 prehistory students. At the moment, the collection consists of 50 000 archaeological remains and was founded by Moritz Hörnes in 1899. The objects are mostly remains found on the surface, just a few items are from archaeological excavations. In the last 100 years, the numbered objects were registered in the inventory.
The purpose of our project is to input data of the objects from the inventory, the publications of the remains and from the original objects in a MS-Access database. Our goal is to make access to the collection easier for study and research. Until now, 28 000 of 50 000 objects have been described, and there are 5 000 photos and 5 000 scanned picture from publications.
These information (discription, photos, catalogues) are published on our homepage. There is a montly report of our activities and the balance of work done. The whole database is being exported to UNIDAM, a web-based picture archive of the University twice a year. Until now, there have been five lectures where the students were able to gain experience with the database, and a couple of them are now working in the project group. Twice a year there is an open day with special presentations of selected objects.
We use the informations of our predecessors, who wrote down their data in the inventory. We also want to be able to present our data to the students in a hundred years. What can we do to make sure that this data is still available then?
Keywords: collection, archaeological remains, archiving, database