D6.1: Quantity of access offered

This deliverable describes the transnational access (TNA) activities carried out in the framework of the ARIADNE project, from 2014 to 2016 as part of the activities of Work Package 6 (WP6) by PIN, Prato (Italy). It describes the programme and objectives of the training activities, and the participants’ profiles and feedback.

The first activity was a week-long group visit, organized with the format of summer school on “Mapping existing datasets to CIDOC CRM”, taking place in Prato between 26 and 30 May 2014. The goal of the summer school was to enable researchers and professionals to map their datasets to the CIDOC CRM standard, an exercise required to integrate them in a wider framework such as the ARIADNE one. The first activity was successful, although the number of participants was limited. Only three researchers were, indeed, able to attend the workshop, mostly due to the non availability of the other applicants to join in on the fixed dates. For this reason, the team at PIN decided to offer researchers the possibility to visit the centre as individual access, with more flexibility on the dates that were agreed in advance with the visiting researchers.

During the following years (2015-2016) PIN hosted 32 researchers as individual visits, and concluded the TNA offer with a workshop on “Legacy datasets and their inclusion in the ARIADNE Registry” hosting 13 researchers from 12-16 December 2016. In total PIN awarded 47 researchers with a scholarship. The high number of TNA fellow hosted at PIN is motivated by the interest in the topic of the course offered and also is due to the availability of PIN to accept candidates with a research project in scientific archaeological datasets. This corrective action was taken to take into account WP9 activities, which had initially stalled; the details of the corrective actions and the outcome of the course are described in the deliverable D9.1 Quantity of access offered.

The transnational access to PIN’s facilities provided a summary background of the CIDOC CRM ontology, showing some case studies and some frequently used templates (e.g. for chronology, authorship, locations, etc.). PIN’s TNA program attracted scholars and archaeological researchers of all levels of experience, from postgraduate students, to experienced researchers, and technician, from institutions located in 13 different European countries. Participants proposed their case studies and research projects and learned how to transform their datasets in a CIDOC CRM compatible format for enhancing integration and for raising a wide interoperability among different archives.

The deliverable reports the results achieved, relying on the feedback given by the participants, which were collected via the TNA summary user report, at the end of each visit (reported in the appendix).

Furthermore, each participant who requested the scholarship from ARIADNE has completed the European Commission’s user group questionnaire using the online form.