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Introduction
Good morning! My name is John Hale, and I’m from Ball State
University. For the past several years Dr. Ben Swartz of Ball State has
been working on establishing a Web-based depository for rock art images.
Dr. Swartz and I have been working together over the past six months to develop
the Swartz Global Archive of Prehistoric Rock Art Photographs.
The purpose of this database is to establish a rich global archive of
prehistoric rock art images available to everyone for analysis and study.
This searchable database is entirely a public domain, and no institution,
agency, or other corporate entity will have any special claim to the material
posted in the database.
To generate such a photographic database, it is necessary to have all
interested persons submit images. In order to facilitate the submission of
images, we have designed a simple yet effective interface with which users will
be able to submit images and associated information via an online form.
The form consists of various fields to be completed as applicable, plus a field
for uploading the rock art image itself. All materials submitted will be
included, but original field views by digital cameras are especially sought.
Technical Specs
The database is currently being hosted by Ball State University in Muncie,
Indiana at the following URL.
http://web.bsu.edu/rockart.
The database itself is a Microsoft Access database for prototyping purposes,
which will be upgraded to a SQL Server database for implementation, once testing
is finished. The Web interface consists of a standard HTML document, designed
around the image database, with a Microsoft Active Server Pages bridge between
the HTML front end and the Access or SQL database through an ODBC connection.*
The advantage to using Active Server Pages over another scripting language, such
as JavaScript, is that when using ASP, the browser sends and receives only HTML.
This eliminates the need for any plug-ins or additional software. Older
browsers, and browsers not configured for other scripting languages or CGI**
scripts can still access the Rock Art Archive without problems.
* (Open Database Connectivity — A standardized database access
method)
** (Common Gateway Interface — compiled and requires programming
knowledge, increasing maintenance; they also slow down the server)
The Interface
The interface consists of a Welcome page, a series of pages for the
submission of images, a Search page for querying the database, and a Contact
page for sending e-mail to the database administrators.
The Submission pages consist of three pages of information. The first
page contains information on the Contributor. Certain fields are required
for submission, so if the administrators have questions regarding the image, the
contributor can be contacted. We have provided a series of check boxes,
however, that allow the contributor to prevent their personal information from
being displayed with the image, to protect their privacy.
The second page of information is about the image itself. Certain key
fields are required, such as country, region, rock art type and so forth.
The results of a search against the database will return a list of images with
the required fields displayed, allowing the user to narrow his or her search and
view only the images they desire.
Information recorded about the image includes the terrain, vegetation, and
particulars concerning the rendering method, cultural affiliation, and so forth.
In addition, a keywords field is provided at the end of the form for any
keywords the contributor feels are important but were not covered by any other
field in the form. Dr. Swartz and I have attempted to anticipate as much
as possible the information that would be most useful for a researcher.
Obviously not everyone will agree on what information is most important or
should or should not be included. The information we have included,
however, we hope will provide enough data for the serious researcher to be able
to follow up on any image. Which of course is where the contributor
information is important.
The last contribution page is the image upload page, which allows the
contributor to browse their hard drive or floppy disk for the image file and
upload it to the database. While in the testing phase, all images are
automatically loaded into the database and can be immediately viewed. When
fully implemented, however, the uploaded images will be screened by an
administrator before being released for general viewing. While this means
that images are not automatically available for viewing, it will prevent abuse
of the database.
The Search page is a simplified version of the contribution pages, and allows
the user to search on any of the criteria listed, except for the contributor
information. The search is dynamic, and looks for all instances of the
search criteria. Certain fields, such as Prevailing Terrain and
Vegetation, are standardized to limit the number of choices. We have tried
to represent all of the major types of terrain and vegetation, but as with
everything on the site, we are always open to suggestions.
The search results are presented in a list of images matching the search
criteria. Currently the information in the list includes the Country,
Region, Nearest Municipality, and Rock Art Type. Clicking on the icon to
the left of the list item will display the image and associated information.
Conclusion
The Rock Art Archive is intended to make images of rock art available to
researchers. Through a simple yet dynamic interface, we hope to make it
easy to retrieve images in the area of interest to both scholar and layman
alike. This concludes my presentation. Thank you.
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