title: Preserving an Evolving Collection: “On-The-Fly” Solutions for The Chora of Metaponto Publication Series
creators: Jessica Trelogan Maria Esteva Lauren Jackson
abstract: As digital scholarship continues to transform research, so it
  changes the way we present and publish it. In archaeology, this
  has meant a transition from the traditional print monograph,
  representing the “definitive” interpretation of a site or landscape,
  to an online, open, and interactive model in which data collections
  have become central. Online representations of archaeological
  research must achieve transparency, exposing the connections
  between fieldwork and research methods, data objects, metadata,
  and derived conclusions. Accomplishing this often requires
  multiple platforms that can be burdensome to integrate and
  preserve. To address this, the Institute of Classical Archaeology
  and the Texas Advanced Computing Center have developed a
  “collection architecture” that integrates disparate and distributed
  cyberinfrastructure resources through a customized automated
  metadata platform, along with procedures for data presentation
  and preservation. The system supports “on-the-fly” data archiving
  and publication, as the collection is organized, shared,
  documented, analyzed, and distributed.
keywords: archaeological data; database preservation; collection architecture