Keeping users informed: using content advisories and emphasising the person when disseminating archives with human remains
Teagan Zoldoske
There is an increasing importance to ensure that archive users have informed consent regarding what they are viewing. When this is applied to a digital archive, it can be more difficult to ensure that users know what they are accessing prior to viewing it due to the number of ways that digital data can be accessed. Add in the further complication of human remains from a British early medieval cemetery and things get a bit more complicated. The Archaeology Data Service, as a part of the High Speed 2 (HS2) infrastructure project, was tasked with archiving and disseminating data pertaining to the human remains from several cemeteries that were excavated over the course of the project. This talk will discuss the steps that the ADS took to add content advisories and context to digital archives that contained digital objects relating to different individuals.

So how was this done? Each digital archive and digital object that contains data about human remains receives a tag stating what sensitive information it contains. This tag then triggers notifications on the archive metadata page, the object metadata page, and blurs images/3D models where applicable. While this approach works to provide practical information for users, we felt that some digital objects should also be disseminated with additional contextual information. Within the medieval cemeteries excavated as part of HS2, most individuals were not easily identifiable, but we could give as much context as possible to each individual by linking each individual’s photogrammetry model with associated contextual information and excavation photos. This information was provided on an individual level with a specific web page that displayed an interactive 3D model and the associated contextual information. For larger cemeteries, the individuals were also presented spatially by showing their burial locations on a web map with a sidebar that provides the additional contextual information and links to the individual’s information page. The tagging and techniques that were used can be applied more broadly and include instances where harmful language is used for example and we hope to apply what we learned from HS2 to the rest of our archival holdings.
legal and social responsibilities for dp start 2 preserve