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Organizing Your Data

Before submitting your data to tDAR, organize your resources into groups based on some commonality. Useful organization strategies include grouping resources by:

  • Archaeological projects (e.g. Big Bend River Survey, Excavation at 45WH30).
  • Reports/Articles and related resources, such as datasets.

Collections

Collections are an ideal method for organizing resources in tDAR.  They can be stacked or nested to allow you to group and embed related projects, independent resources, and other collections.  Collections also simplify managing rights and the way that others can access your resources by enabling you to easily manage permissions on groups of resources.

Projects

Projects are the tDAR method for intentionally grouping resources together. Users can also group resources together temporarily by using tDAR’s search functions (i.e. to find all data sets with the word “Faunal” and from the period 200-1450 A.D.).

Projects are not necessarily analogous to archaeological excavations, but for discrete archaeological projects, it makes sense to group together excavation photos, site reports, level forms and artifact measurements under a tDAR Project named for the archaeological project.

The advantage of using a project to organize your resources is twofold:

Inheritance

Projects allow users to set general metadata (see “Metadata” below) at the project level. Resources that are grouped under a Project will “inherit” the Project-level metadata automatically, saving users from having to enter repetitious metadata at the Resource level. Resource level metadata can be customized for each resource, allowing more specific information to be used for individual files or resources.

For example, if all your resources deal with the period from 200-1450 A.D., you can set the Project “Temporal Coverage” field accordingly. Now every resource added to the project will be able to inherit the “Temporal Coverage” field from the Project, without needing to re-enter “200-1450 A.D.” for every resource.

For more information, see Inheriting Project Metadata

h3. Organization

Projects allow users to move from the Resource level and find other resources from the same project.

For example, a user reading the Kennewick Man Cultural Affiliation Report might want to also see the DNA testing results. Seeing that the report is grouped under the Project title: “The Archaeology of Kennewick Man,” upon clicking on the Project title, the user is able to view other associated resources such as letters from the U.S. Secretary of the Interior to the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, radiocarbon dating results and -eureka!- the DNA testing results!

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