Monday, February 09, 2009

Off-Topic: SHARD, artifact cataloging program

http://www.sonoma.edu/asc/shard

Of potential interest to anyone developing programs to catalogue artefacts:
SHARD, our artifact cataloging program, has just been posted!

http://www.sonoma.edu/asc/shard

Download it free, gratis, and for nothing.

SHARD provides a consistent and (mostly) idiot‐proof system of pull-down menus to catalog artifacts/artefacts from mid‐19th to early‐20th‐century archaeological sites and to create data tables that facilitate comparison.

Although we at ASC have been excavating urban sites since the 1970s, the impetus to create SHARD came from a series of hugely productive archaeological projects in the 1990s and early 2000s sponsored by the California Department of Transportation. These massive San Francisco Bay Area undertakings required a whole new way of recording and tabulating the nearly 1,000,000 individual items recovered from the excavations.

Bootleg versions of ASC's heretofore unnamed cataloging system have been circulating on the archaeological underground for several years. It has taken quite some time and a whole lot of volunteer effort to get to the point of releasing this definitive edition of SHARD to the archaeological community.

Kind comments and suggestions are welcome. However, this has been a labor of love so we're really not that interested in hearing how you would have done it. Oh so much better if only we'd thought to ask.

SHARD is built on MS Office Access 2003, so you'll need that program to run it. Everyone is free to use, reproduce, and adapt it to best suits their needs. SHARD was created by archaeologists Erica Gibson and Mary Praetzellis; Bryan Much helped with database design in Access. The Manual was written by Erica Gibson.

Regards,
Adrian

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ADRIAN PRAETZELLIS, Ph.D.
Professor of Anthropology
Director, Anthropological Studies Center
Sonoma State University
Rohnert Park, California
USA 94928

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