Digital Finds

English Heritage and copyrighted archaeological data

I received an email a while ago sent to one of the big distribution lists here at OA, it really annoyed me at the time and I think now is the time to share it with a wider audience. This is how I read it:

I have just acquired the paper report for the Upper Thames NMP, carried out by English Heritage in the early 1990s.

So far I'm not very interested; this is usually the sort of email I'd delete without even thinking about, but for some reason I had a look at this one.

I also have a digital copy (GIS shapefiles) of the AP transcriptions for Gloucestershire, which I've saved to:

There is also a digital copy (georeferenced tiffs) of the transcriptions for the Abingdon/Dorchester area here:

Now this is much more interesting! I'd been talking to a friend recently who'd downloaded a selection of Open Source GIS applications but wasn't having much fun playing with them because he didn't have any suitable data. No worries though, all this stuff has been carried out by English Heritage, therefore paid for by his taxes; what data could be better to play with?

PLEASE NOTE: these are copyrighted images/data and permission is needed to reproduced them IN ANY FORM.

Thanks English Heritage, that's ruined that bit of fun. I won't download these files from the server but will place a Freedom of Information Act request.

Posted at 09:23PM Jul 09, 2008 by Joseph Reeves in General  |  Comments[1]