Sebastian Heath, University of Michigan. "Encouraging Collaboration: On-line Publication of Mediterranean Pottery"

The specific topic of this presentation is the "Registry of Mediterranean Pottery" or RMP, an on-line database of mostly Late Roman ceramics from sites around the Mediterranean. It is currently available on the internet at http://antaeus.holycross.edu/rmp/. RMP is a preliminary effort to make ceramic data accessible to both specialist and non-specialist audiences in a manner that promotes cross-project analyses of economic and cultural phenomena in the ancient Mediterranean. As such it raises issues that will become prominent as more electronic publications become available. Central to RMP is a flexible and uncomplicated representation of archaeological ceramics that describes finds from many different projects, ones that have used diverse methodologies for collection and varied standards for recording ceramic data. This representation is one starting point for discussing the extent to which on-line publication can encourage the creation of cross-project databases without attempting to enforce arbitrary standards that do not satisfy the needs of any single project in particular.

As a web-site, RMP exists as a set of interactive queries that determine how the database can be used, a fact that emphasizes that on-line publication requires as much attention to functionality as it does to content. This is particularly true of a database such as RMP that should allow users to explore questions that the author or authors may not have considered. The issue of RMP's audience leads to the last topic to be discussed, allowing for user-definable interfaces to online resources. Ways of accessing a database can proliferate in an attempt to accommodate users who range from specialists interested in specific sherds to less focussed audiences looking for Mediterranean wide distribution maps. RMP allows user-initiated customization of which functionally is available so that flexibility does not come at the cost of unreasonable complexity.