I’ve commented here and here about the question of data reuse (or more accurately, the lack of it) and the implications for archaeological digital repositories. It’s frequently argued that the key incentive for making data available for reuse is providing credit through citation. So how’s that going? I’ve not seen any attempt to actually quantify this, so out of curiosity I thought I’d have a go.
A logical starting point is Thomson Reuters Data Citation Index – according to its owners (it’s a licensed rather than public resource), this indexes the contents of a large number of the world’s leading data repositories, and, on checking, the UK’s Archaeology Data Service (ADS) appears among them. So far so good.
We often hear of the active archive, but what about an idle one? In a post on 
We’re accustomed to the fact that much archaeology is collaborative in nature: we work with and rely on the work of others all the time to achieve our archaeological ends. However, what we overlook is the way in which much of what we do as archaeologists is dependent upon invisible collaborators – people who are absent, distanced, even disinterested. And these aren’t archaeologists working remotely and accessing the same virtual research environment as us in real time, although some of them may be archaeologists who developed the specialist software we have chosen to use. The majority of these are people we will never know, cannot know, who themselves will be ignorant of the context in which we have chosen to apply their products, and indeed, to compound things, will generally be unaware of each other. They are, quite literally, the ghosts in the machine.
Visualisation is much in vogue at present, especially with the increasing availability and accessibility of virtual reality devices such as the 
We’re becoming increasingly accustomed to our digital technologies acting as gatekeepers – perhaps most obviously in the way that the smartphone acts as gatekeeper to our calendar and/or email. In fact, this technological gatekeeping functionality appears everywhere you look, whether it’s in the form of physical devices providing access to information, software interfaces providing access to tools, or web interfaces providing access to data, for example. A while ago, I mused about the way that archaeological data are increasingly made available via key gatekeepers, and that consequently “
Solutions to the crisis in archaeological archives in an environment of shrinking resources often involve selection and discard of the physical material and an increased reliance on the digital. For instance, several presentations to a 