Welcome to the new Sourcing Series!
We’re big on (re)using and linking to materials here at the Alexandria Archive Institute’s (AAI) Data Literacy Program (DLP). Because of that, we thought it might be helpful if we outlined how to source and attribute/cite all those cool materials! There are lots of ways to find and attribute different kinds of media. Because of that, we’ll share a series of short articles exploring those possibilities. So, welcome to the new Sourcing Series!
In this series, we’ll explore the concept of “sourcing” broadly. This includes where to find materials like data sets, text, and images. As well as how licenses and attribution allow us to use, reuse, or link to those media.
However, everyone has their own favorite places to find materials, data sets, and new media. And a preferred way to link back to them! Unfortunately, finding reliable sources, picking how to link to them, and deciding how to relocate those places and pieces can be challenging. Through this series we will highlight well-known sources for those materials and summarize existing practices for attribution. In addition, we’ll introduce new ways to attribute those materials and connect our community with lesser-known resources for archaeology-related data, images, teaching resources, and collections.
The ability to find, attribute, and reuse online materials is an important part of archaeological data literacy. However, it’s not always clear how to attribute the many and diverse types of digital content out there. We hope that through this series of how-to and recommendation articles we can make the concept of sourcing archaeological data, texts, images, and other online-media more approachable. That way we encourage the use and reuse of the amazing archaeological knowledge already available online!
We’ll start the series in the next article with an introduction to the concept of “licenses.” That article highlights what licenses we look for when selecting materials to use, reuse, and link to. While in our daily lives (outside of the DLP and AAI) we regularly use, reuse, and share digital materials without references to attribution or licenses, it’s important for us as data literacy cultivators to encourage best practices. So, we seek out and share images, data sets, and other media, in our Data Stories and other products, that have appropriate licenses. And by appropriate we mean licenses that allow for sharing.
Check out our next Sourcing Series segment to find out more! And let us know what sourcing questions or struggles you have so we can share our knowledge and help cultivate everyone’s archaeological data literacy.
