Thursday 9 May 2013

Searching for free resources

Preparing teaching has kept me extremely busy and together with balancing the family life and other aspect of life has kept me away from my weekly blog. As was to be expected, some teaching was cancelled; it has been a steep learning curve how much own initiative and publicity one should actually do for courses. Nobody will enrol to your courses unless they know they exist. I got tangible help for a course in Nottingham that starts tomorrow - and it shows, since it is happening.

I have recently spent a lot of time searching for archaeological resources in the web in order to help people to find materials for studying landscape archaeology and/or archaeological sites both locally and worldwide. The resources are plenty, but one has to know where to look for them, and some of the earlier resources have disappeared or have so many broken links they are practically redundant. Free satellite coverage is here, but the free availability of printed material seem to have shrunken somewhat – no matter how many open access publications have been presented or how much of the historic content of some journals are becoming available.

However, one has to admire the wealth of resources made available by the English Heritage. Not only do they run databases, but there are the presentations of the sites they manage and the pdf copies of many of the past reports and publications. These materials are easiest to find when you are searching them from the sites in question. It is so easy to get lost in the search engines with all the books in Amazon filling the list of the resulting entries. One has to guess the most efficient search words and combinations in order to catch the right resources and move between different search engines. Sometimes I miss the search engine from the ‘prehistory’ of the net, Infosearch; it used to provide relevant quality answers consistently.


If you want to know what I have been doing, please, check the taster for my online course 'Googling the Earth' using the text link or the image link below. If you are seriously interested, check the details immediately from this link. It costs £220, but I will be available for support, discussions and tips online during the 7-week run of the course (contracted hours, so I will not be constantly available online, but keep an eye daily during the work days).

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