This week I continued to add grey
archaeobotanical literature to the online repository, Figshare. Two
mostly prehistoric datasets were included from two separate (but
adjacent) excavations at Gortore in north Cork.
It takes around half an hour to
three-quarters of an hour to prepare the grey literature files for
the repository. This is mostly because I spend quite a lot of time
cross-referencing the reports, linking to them, and adding a template
cover page with details of how to cite, and where to find further
information on the site.
One of the issues that has arisen as I
prepare these cover pages is the issue of when the reports were
written. Most of my technical reports include a date of when the
reports were finished, with a note on when they were updated, if this
ever occurred. I adopted this practice more than ten years ago, as I
found it difficult to keep track of when I had written everything
based on memory alone. In some cases these details have been deleted
out of the finished/edited text that is included as an appendix in
the final excavation report. So, for example, I have suggested that
the report for Gortore 1 is dated to 2009, as this is the date that I
incorporated it into Google Drive. However, I know it was written
earlier, sometime around 2006 or 2007, but I have no record of
exactly when. On top of this, Figshare provides its own citation
guidelines, based on date of “publication”. This means that all
of the reports that I have uploaded are dated to 2014, even though
they were written much earlier.
