The SAA Archaeological Record May 2012, Volume 12, Number 3 : Page 19

ARTICLE DIGITIZING THE ARCHIVES OF ARCHAEOLOGY SERIES Joseph A. Tiffany Joseph A. Tiffany is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse and Executive Director of the Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center. He may be reached at jtiffany@uwlax.edu. uring the past year the Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center (MVAC) at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse (UW-L) has digitized the 29-volume set of the Archives of Archaeology. This publication series was a joint proj-ect of the University of Wisconsin Press and the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) during the 1960s. Original reports in the series were published on opaque microcards. David A. Baerreis edited the Archives of Archaeology series for the SAA. The Archives of Archaeology as a concept was proposed at the 1959 meeting of the SAA at Norman, Oklahoma (Compton 1961:206). According to the inside back cover of the July 1960 American Antiquity issue (vol. 26, no.1), the Archives of Archae-ology consisted of “occasional publication on microcard of pri-mary documentation of archaeological material.” In the April 1960 issue of American Antiquity, Baerreis and Solon (25:623–625) explained that the Archives of Archaeology was cre-ated to disseminate original reports, resulting mainly from fed-erally funded research projects, in an inexpensive format that would be accessible to researchers nationwide. The majority of f the reports in the Archives of Archaeology series, and the series itself, were reviewed favorably in major professional journals. These journals include American Anthropologist in 1965 (Ascher 1965), American Antiquity in 1961 (Bell, Compton, Euler, Gid-dings) and 1964 (Di Peso), the American Journal of Archaeology in 1961 (Woodbury) and 1964 (Smith), Ethnohistory in 1961 (Wood-bury), and the Plains Anthropologist in 1973 (Butzer). Five Archives reports are dissertations or parts of dissertations (Table 1, reports no. 8, 10, 12, 15, and 28), with changes noted in four of them. Four of the original reports have been reprint-ed. They include Ná n za , the Ponca Fort, (report no. 3), which was republished by J&L Reprint Co. (Wood 1993) and is now available from Gustav’s Library (gustavslibrary.com). Climatic c Change and the Mill Creek Culture of Iowa (report no. 29) was published in the Journal of the Iowa Archeological Society (vols. 15–16, 1968–69) and is still available. The Hohokam, Sinagua a and the Hakataya (report no. 5) was published with a new intro-duction by the author in 1975. Finally, for the Mobridge report t (report no. 14), an expanded and edited version by this author r D was published in 2010 by the South Dakota Archaeological Soci-ety ( Special Publication 13). Three published books, now out of print, contain portions of f research originally assembled for reports in the Archives of f Archaeology series. The copyrights on these books were not renewed. Swauger’s 1974 large-format Rock Art of the Upper Ohio Valley includes a greatly expanded treatment and discussion of f the four sites he discussed in report no. 17 in the Archives series. In his 1978 introduction on the Klamath Basin Petroglyphs, Swartz notes that this published study is a much abbreviated version of f his mammoth work that comprises report no. 21. Finally, a flatbed-scanned copy of Ellison Orr’s original work (report no. 20), as well as other Orr reports, notes, and memorabilia, is avail-able from Effigy Mounds National Monument (EMNM) near McGregor, Iowa, with electronic copies on file at the Office of the State Archaeologist of Iowa at The University of Iowa (OSA) and at MVAC. These electronic copies of Orr’s work are of high quality— far surpassing the microcard version. The Archives of f Archaeology series editors noted in their comments on the micro-card for report no. 20 that they had trouble producing this num-ber because of oversized maps and the like. The Microcards The format chosen for the Archives of Archaeology series was micro-opaques, and this format became a major problem in terms of both utility and accessibility. Unlike microfiche cards, micro-opaques have individual pages captured as positive pho-tographs, substantially reduced in size and reproduced on both sides of 3 x 5 inch plastic cards for easy filing in a standard card catalog storage cabinet (another dead technology). The Archives of Archaeology series consists of several thousand pages imprinted on 172 cards (Figure 1). While once promoted as the “wave of the future” for archival data storage in the pre-computer age (Jamison 1988), microcard technology never caught on as an archival tool. In his review Ascher (1965:584) was critical of the use of microcards as the May 2012 • The SAA Archaeological Record 19

Digitizing The Archives Of Archaeology Series

Joseph A. Tiffany

Joseph A. Tiffany is Professor of Archaeology at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse and Executive Director of the Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center. He may be reached at jtiffany@uwlax.edu. During the past year the Mississippi Valley Archaeology Center (MVAC) at the University of Wisconsin–La Crosse (UW-L) has digitized the 29-volume set of the Archives of Archaeology. This publication series was a joint project of the University of Wisconsin Press and the Society for American Archaeology (SAA) during the 1960s. Original reports in the series were published on opaque microcards. David A. Baerreis edited the Archives of Archaeology series for the SAA. The Archives of Archaeology as a concept was proposed at the 1959 meeting of the SAA at Norman, Oklahoma (Compton 1961:206). According to the inside back cover of the July 1960 American Antiquity issue (vol. 26, no.1), the Archives of Archaeology consisted of “occasional publication on microcard of primary documentation of archaeological material.” In the April 1960 issue of American Antiquity, Baerreis and Solon (25:623–625) explained that the Archives of Archaeology was created to disseminate original reports, resulting mainly from federally funded research projects, in an inexpensive format that would be accessible to researchers nationwide. The majority of the reports in the Archives of Archaeology series, and the series itself, were reviewed favorably in major professional journals. These journals include American Anthropologist in 1965 (Ascher 1965) , American Antiquity in 1961 (Bell, Compton, Euler, Giddings) and 1964 (Di Peso), the American Journal of Archaeology in 1961 (Woodbury) and 1964 (Smith), Ethnohistory in 1961 (Woodbury), and the Plains Anthropologist in 1973 (Butzer). Five Archives reports are dissertations or parts of dissertations (Table 1, reports no. 8, 10, 12, 15, and 28), with changes noted in four of them. Four of the original reports have been reprinted. They include Nánza , the Ponca Fort, (report no. 3), which was republished by J&L Reprint Co. (Wood 1993) and is now available from Gustav’s Library (gustavslibrary.com). Climatic Change and the Mill Creek Culture of Iowa (report no. 29) was published in the Journal of the Iowa Archeological Society (vols. 15–16, 1968–69) and is still available. The Hohokam, Sinagua and the Hakataya (report no. 5) was published with a new introduction by the author in 1975. Finally, for the Mobridge report (report no. 14), an expanded and edited version by this author was published in 2010 by the South Dakota Archaeological Society (Special Publication 13). Three published books, now out of print, contain portions of research originally assembled for reports in the Archives of Archaeology series. The copyrights on these books were not renewed. Swauger’s 1974 large-format Rock Art of the Upper Ohio Valley includes a greatly expanded treatment and discussion of the four sites he discussed in report no. 17 in the Archives series. In his 1978 introduction on the Klamath Basin Petroglyphs, Swartz notes that this published study is a much abbreviated version of his mammoth work that comprises report no. 21. Finally, a flatbed-scanned copy of Ellison Orr’s original work (report no. 20) , as well as other Orr reports, notes, and memorabilia, is available from Effigy Mounds National Monument (EMNM) near McGregor, Iowa, with electronic copies on file at the Office of the State Archaeologist of Iowa at The University of Iowa (OSA) and at MVAC. These electronic copies of Orr’s work are of high quality—f ar surpassing the microcard version. The Archives of Archaeology series editors noted in their comments on the microcard for report no. 20 that they had trouble producing this number because of oversized maps and the like. The Microcards The format chosen for the Archives of Archaeology series was micro-opaques, and this format became a major problem in terms of both utility and accessibility. Unlike microfiche cards, micro-opaques have individual pages captured as positive photographs, substantially reduced in size and reproduced on both sides of 3 x 5 inch plastic cards for easy filing in a standard card catalog storage cabinet (another dead technology). The Archives of Archaeology series consists of several thousand pages imprinted on 172 cards (Figure 1). While once promoted as the “wave of the future” for archival data storage in the pre-computer age (Jamison 1988), microcard technology never caught on as an archival tool. In his review Ascher (1965:584) was critical of the use of microcards as the Storage method the SAA chose for the Archives series. The Archives of Archaeology reports in microcard format are now extremely scarce as complete sets and difficult to use, and it is virtually impossible to make readable paper copies of any image/page on the card. Reading one of these reports requires a special micro-opaque reader, a good opaque projector system, or at a minimum, a binocular dissecting microscope or lowpower hand lens. We tried scanning and other methods, but because of the low resolution of the page images on the cards, making copies of the page images without a special and very expensive micro-opaque reader/printer is impossible. Rapid copying, dissemination, and data-storage/retrieval capability are taken for granted today, as are archivally accessible, digitized archaeological reports, but the Archives of Archaeology series was conceived and implemented before the computer age. Because of their obscure microcard format, most of the pioneering reports in this series remain underutilized and largely unknown to the current generation of archaeologists and other researchers. Since the microcard format makes access and use very difficult, the purpose of this digitization project was to make the reports readily available as initially conceived by Baerreis and the SAA. Preservation and access to these reports are the key elements of this project. After exhaustive search I could track down only two paper copies of original reports (report no. 14 by Baerreis and Dallman; report no. 20 by Orr) still in existence. The original of report no. 14 is now archived at MVAC. The various original manuscripts comprising report no. 20 and other related documents, as stated, are housed at Effigy Mounds National Monument. Other copies of Archives reports may be available elsewhere. For example Katmai National Park has a manuscript copy of Davis’ original 1954 study (report no. 4; http://www.Nps.gov/history/history/online_books/katm/hrs/hrsb.htm). After consultation with the University of Wisconsin Press, I am unaware of any surviving subscriber’s list. However, partial and complete microcard sets of the Archives of Archaeology series still exist. During work prior to the 2010 edited Mobridge report, I did a straightforward Internet search that identified only two complete sets of the series in university libraries. Since then, library databases have expanded dramatically as have Internet search capabilities. A recent simple search of WorldCat (http://www.worldcat.org/) for the Archives of Archaeology produced 34 libraries with sets. WorldCat is the largest online public access catalog available. If you search WorldCat by author for an Archives of Archaeology report, many more libraries may appear for that particular report compared to the results of the simple “Archives of Archaeology” search. Researchers undoubtedly have tracked down library sources for the Archives of Archaeology numbers they use in their research, but given their irreplaceable nature, some libraries, as we have discovered, will no longer lend out their microcards on interlibrary loan. WorldCat is the primary source to locate where all the remaining complete and partial sets of the Archives of Archaeology reside. The series needs the hand of a bibliographer to document fully the titles, number of pages, front matter, illustrations, contributing authors, and the like since I noted minor discrepancies in these data when comparing the primary sources used to assemble the final list in Table 1. For example, the same reports are cited differently by authors in their reviews compared with Table 1. Sometimes the title page is in the page count, but it is usually not. Report no. 12 includes an extra title page. One of the co-authors of reports 9 and 11 (Evans) is listed with a different middle initial, and so on. The information listed in Table 1 includes authors, titles, and publication dates and is derived from comparing the University of Toronto catalog listings against the Luther College (Decorah, Iowa) listings, a shorter list published in American Antiquity in 1961 (vol. 27, no. 2, p.263) , and the information on the cards themselves. Digitizing the Archives of Archaeology Both the SAA and the University of Wisconsin Press were contacted, and both confirmed in writing that neither organization holds a copyright on the Archives of Archaeology. Online searches further confirmed that neither organization had registered a copyright for the Archives of Archaeology, nor had any of the individual authors copyrighted their works. Once it was confirmed that the Archives of Archaeology reports are in the public domain, work then proceeded on the digitization project. Since only one original paper report was available at MVAC for scanning and conversion to a searchable PDF format, another means for electronic data capture was necessary. After I discussed the situation with UW-L librarians, the university library purchased a ScanPro 2000 in late 2010 for library use. The Scan- Pro 2000 is a scanner that when combined with a computer can make digitized images from microfiche, microcard, or microfilm. Each image can be viewed, adjusted, scanned, and digitized rapidly. The UW-L library arranged a no-cost loan of one of the complete sets of the Archives of Archaeology from the University of Wisconsin–Madison Memorial Library. With the help of a small grant from the UW-L College of Liberal Studies, we were able to scan the entire 29-volume set in a little over three weeks. After scanning several pages, we set a series of scan parameters that gave us the best collective images for each report. Each individual page on each microcard was copied, resulting in thousands of images. Each image was scanned and saved at 600 dpi as an uncompressed TIFF file. Next, the TIFF files were bundled by report and converted to JPEGs. The final product is 14.7 GB of data. The JPEG We did some testing with images trying to enhance them in Adobe Photoshop, but the process was far too time consuming, and frankly, the originals were not that good in the first place. Users of the bundled PDF reports, however, can save individual pages and open them in Adobe Photoshop and adjust the levels. These adjustments can help on some photographs, but on others the quality of the original is so poor that digital enhancement does little good. As mentioned, difficulties in producing the card imagery were noted by the original editors, especially with the Orr reports (no. 20) because of oversize maps in the reports. We made copies of both reports 14 and 20 of the Archives series from the microcards so that our project would result in a complete digital set of all the reports from the microcards. Researchers interested in Orr’s work should contact the Iowa OSA or EMNM. The PDF of report 14 is available from the scanned original document at MVAC as well as the converted version from the microcards. Storage, Distribution, and Availability This digitization project will make pioneering and important archaeological research of national significance widely and easily accessible in a systematic way to researchers, students, and the general public, which was the original purpose of the Archives of Archaeology. Through time, however, the feature-rich nature of PDFs may create difficulties in long-term preservation. Sciencefiction buffs will note that in Arthur C. Clarke’s 1973 classic Rendezvous with Rama, “The Ramans do everything in threes.” With this in mind the data storage and access to the digital Archives of Archaeology is as follows. MVAC has a set of the original TIFFs and the bundled report JPEGs on its file server, and the Iowa OSA has a set of the bundled report JPEGs on its file server. Digital Antiquity (http://www.digitalantiquity.org/) has a set of the unbundled TIFFS and the report JPEGs and will host them online in their digital repository this spring on The Digital Archaeological Record (tDAR; http://dev.tdar.org/confluence/ display/TDAR/Home). Finally, the University of Wisconsin Digital Collections Center (UWDCC http://uwdc.library.wisc.edu/) will make a metafile conversion of the original TIFF images and host the Archives of Archaeology on their web page in the near future. The MVAC and OSA sets are project archives, while tDAR and UWDC will provide ready online access to the Archives of Archaeology for study and downloading as well as maintenance of all the original TIFF images. Recall that we are unaware of the existence of an original report distribution list for the microcard series; however, tDAR and UWDCC will notify the Online Computer Library Center, Inc. (OCLC) when the Archives are launched. OCLC and its cooperating libraries and institutions produce and maintain WorldCat. Thus, those libraries and institutions that now have the microcard version will be made aware of the electronic version of the Archives of Archaeology for their library users. Acknowledgments. This project was funded by a research grant from the College of Liberal Studies, UW-L. I want to thank many people who helped immensely in various aspects of this project. At MVAC they include Michael Bednarchuk, Katherine P. Stevenson, and former student Kassie Praska, who did the actual scanning of the microcards. Thanks to Stephen C. Lensink and John Doershuk, Office of the State Archaeologist of Iowa, who agreed to store a complete set of the digitized Archives of Archaeology, and to John Neikirk, Society for American Archaeology, for assisting with copyright information on the series. I also thank Melissa McLimans and Peter Gorman, Wisconsin Digital Collection Center (UWDCC), for hosting the Archives of Archaeology on the UWDC website and for securing a complete set for us to digitize. Thanks to the Digital Archaeological Record for also hosting the digitized Archives on tDAR. Special thanks to Anita Evans, UW-L Library Director, whose purchase of the ScanPro 2000 for the university library made this project possible, and William Doering, UW-L librarian, who assisted in obtaining and transferring the original microcard set and the digitized product to and from Madison. References Cited The complete citations of all references to published works in this report are available from the author. Ascher, R. 1965 Review of Artifact Descriptions and Proveniences for the Ringo Site, by Alfred E. Johnson and Raymond H. Thompson; The Hazzard Collection, by Floyd Sharrock; and Klamath Basin Petroglyphs, by B. K. Swartz Jr. American Anthropologist 67:583–584. Compton, Carl B. 1961 Review of Site Dl-29, a Rockshelter in Northeastern Oklahoma, by Joan E. Freeman; An Archaeological Report on a Cave Deposit in Northeastern Oklahoma, by Joan E. Freeman; and A Report on a Bluff Shelter in Northeastern Oklahoma, by David A. Baerreis and Joan E. Freeman. Ethnohistory 8:205–208. Jamison, Martin 1988 The Microcard: Freeman Rider’s Precomputer Revolution. Libraries and Culture 23:1–17.

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