SEADDA is working to create a holistic understanding of the different levels of experience and engagement across the sector, expressed through four complementary Working Groups (WG):
Working Group 1: Stewardship of Archaeological Data
Working Group 2: Planning for Archiving
Working Group 3: Preservation and Dissemination Best Practice
Working Group 4: Use and Re-use of Archaeological Data
The broad aims of the Working Groups include:
- Bringing parties together who are new to the main aim, facilitating a shared environment for working towards solutions, and allowing accelerated action (WG1)
- Bringing together those interested in, or in the process of creating a persistent repository for the first time, allowing more confident and innovative ideas to be implemented (WG2) Creating a community around the work of existing digital archives, allowing harmonisation of work practices, and the usefulness of new technologies (WG3)
- Exploring how to optimise archaeological data, using both innovative new technologies for organising data and understanding how to optimise research interfaces for re-use (WG4)
- Exploring qualitative re-use of archaeological data to understand what facilitates new knowledge creation using frameworks developed in the social sciences (WG4)
- Exploring how re-use facilitates archaeological research, as digital data can be repurposed and translated from archaeological data to heritage information and narratives that can be accessed by wider publics, bringing relevance beyond archaeology in society that is only possible through the vision and role of a persistent dissemination platform (WG4)
By bringing together stakeholders across the domain for the first time, and focussing through working groups centred on critical issues at each level of engagement with the main aim, SEADDA seeks to push forward all critical areas of discourse around how and why archaeological data should be available for use by future generations.