Steps towards a participatory digital library and data archive for archaeological information

The e-Science related literature sees digital libraries, digital archives and databanks as central collaborative infrastructures for scientific and scholarly research. The present paper discusses preliminary findings and observations from an action research study on a participatory digital library and data archive for archaeological and archaeology related data. The project aims to develop a combined digital repository and collaboratory for archaeological research with a special emphasis on participation and semantically rich relations between individual digital artifacts. The discussed digital library is based on semantic wiki technology and developed together with archaeologists from a small Nordic archaeology consultancy. The findings of the study indicate that the principal challenges associated with the life- cycle approach relate to the paradox of formality and informality of documentation and to the implications the system has on the customary procedures of archaeological information work.