AZSITE CONSORTIUM
Quarterly Meeting, CES, ASU
Wednesday, October 6, 1999
Minutes
Participants:
Michael Barton, ASU, presiding
Beth Grindell, ASM, recording
Peter McCartney, ASU
Steve Erdmann, MNA
Carol Griffith, SHPO, Chair
Jon Shumaker, Ak-Chin Indian Community
Ian Robertson, ASU
Cari Kreshak, Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community
Dallas D. Enos, Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community
Chad Smith, Fort Mohave Tribe
Gary Stumpf, BLM
Rick Karl, ASM
Jarren LeBeach, Ak-Chin Indian Community
Steve Ross, ASLD
Teresa Cadiente, ARS
Cathy Johnson, Arizona State Parks
Bill Doelle, Desert Archaeology
Erika Finbraaten, SHPO
William Collins, SHPO
Michael Ohnersorgen, SHPO
- The meeting was called to order at 9:35 am. Peter McCartney announced that there would be a Database Committee meeting at 1 p.m. Carol Griffith introduced Michael Ohnersorgen as the new SHPO Compliance Officer.
- Grindell and Karl moved and seconded that the minutes of the last meeting be accepted. The minutes were unanimously approved without change.
- Enhancement Funds status report: Carol Griffith reported that the intergovernmental agreement controlling use of ADOT Enhancement Funds was signed. The revised indirect costs had been approved by all agencies. Funds became available in August, although SHPO received an Order to Proceed that was backdated to May. Therefore, Heritage Funds expenditures since May will count toward the non-reimbursable portion.
- Database Committee: Peter McCartney reported that the server has moved to CES and is now on a VBNS (Internet 2 connection) network so connections should be faster. He is hoping for a November 1 opening date. There is a new version of the Standalone database ready for beta testing. It has a digitizing feature incorporated into the data entry form which obviates the need for ArcView software. A data submission tracking system is in development. There is an SDE problem in which multiple shapes and shape types corrupt layers. ESRI engineers are aware of the problem and working on it. He plans to switch to SQL 7.0 before replicating the system. On miscellaneous issues, he reported that a CAZMAL grant for bibliographic records was not funded so that option for recording and retrieving reports will not be available for a while. A database has been developed for environmental bibliographies and its format may be adaptable to AZSITE’s needs. There was general discussion of the need to develop user technical support to deal with installation and operations questions and to develop user friendly graphical search functions. Development of reporting tools is on the backburner now and will probably be accomplished through Visual Basic Java scripts.
- Management Committee: Michael Barton reported the recommendations of the 9/24/99 Management Committee meeting that when the Web interface is available for public use, a letter including a user agreement will be sent out so that potential users may sign up for accounts. The letter will state that AZSITE is in a public evaluation phase, for which no charges will be made but that in six months a fee schedule will be put into place. Barton then reviewed a draft Funding Plan that establishes priorities for essential system components that can be used to allocate any available funds, whether from fees, grants, or legislative apportionment. The top two priorities include a systems administrator at a half-time level and hardware/software maintenance and upgrades. Other essential priorities include administrative support and funding to member agencies for data entry and verification. Second level priorities include increasing the systems administrator position to full time, funding for hardware and software maintence for non-server related needs and additional data entry, data management, and technical support personnel. The Funding Plan includes a proposed fee structure and fee collection procedure. Gary Stumpf noted that even if AZSITE does collect the projected $90,000 in fees it still leaves a large portion of the $246,500 budget uncovered and that he hopes that grants, legislative allocations, and federal monies can be found to cover some of that. Carol Griffith moved to amend the plan by shifting a half-time data manager position into the first level priorities. The amendment was approved unanimously; the revised Funding Plan is attached. In response to a question from Chad Smith, several consortium members noted that it will still be necessary for agencies to maintain paper records.
- Tribal Concerns Committee: Barton reviewed a draft policy concerning the handling of archaeological and historical site data on tribal lands. As a general principle, no tribal lands data will be available in the Cultural Resource Inventory for public viewing, unless the AZSITE Consortium has the express written permission of the tribe. Various modifications to wording were suggested. The revised Proposed Policy on Data about Archaeological and Historic Sites on Tribal Lands and the AZSITE Cultural Resource Inventory is attached. The policy will be sent to tribes for comment and posted to the AZSITE web site (http://azsite.asu.edu). It will be reviewed again in the January meeting.
- The next meeting will be January 11, 2000, at the Arizona State Museum, Tucson, at 9:30 a.m.
AZSite Funding Plan
Approved 6 October 1999
Overview
With the AZSite Culural Resources Inventory on the brink of beginning a public evaluation and use phase, we need to plan for the long-term maintenance and development of the system. We previously decided to support the system through a mix of user fees, grants, and other sources. Of these, user fees most appropriately should go towards maintenance and improvement of the core components of the AZSite system. While we can make rough estimates of possible user fee income, based on data from ASM, this is a new service for the state and we need to be cautious in our budgetary planning based on fee income. Hence, we are proposing a plan to fund a series of core system components in order of priority as fees are collected.
Priorities for the Distribution of AZSite User Fees
AZSite funding priorities are initially divided into two categories: a suite of items that are essential to the successful operation of the AZSite Cultural Resources Inventory and a second group of items that are needed for the longer-term maintenance and improvement of the system--especially in terms of data quality and ease of user access. Within each category, items are ranked in order of funding importance. We propose that each item be funded only after the funding of all higher priority items. In this way we can ensure that available user fees go to support the most essential components, while maintaining the possibility of funding longer-term needs.
Annual Funding for Essential System Components (minimal needed to launch and operate the AZSite Cultural Resources Inventory on a day to day basis)
 | First priority: System Administrator, to be funded initially at 0.5 FTE for up to $32,500 ($25,000 plus benefits) depending on skills and training. |
| Second priority: Up to $10,000 for hardware/software maintenance. The AZSite server and related software has priority over other uses (such as workstations) for this fund. |
| Third priority: Administrative and technical assistant to handle user accounts and fee income. Can also assist System Administrator in support roles. To be funded at 0.5 FTE for up to $16,250 ($12,500 plus benefits) depending on skills and training. |
| Fourth priority: Up to $10,000 to consortium member institutions on an as needed basis to support data entry, cleaning, and management. |
| Fifth priority: Data manager, to be funded initially at 0.5 FTE for up to $26,000 ($20,000 plus benefits) depending on skills an training |
Total annual funding needs for essential system components: $94,750
Annual Funding for Long-Term System Maintenance and Development
| First priority: Increase System Administrator to 1.0 FTE (up to $32,500) |
| Second priority: An additional $9,000 for hardware/software maintenance for non-server related needs (e.g., workstation or software upgrades). Initial hardware and software maintenance fund of $10,000 to be dedicated to AZSite server maintenance and upgrades. |
| Third priority: Three data entry and management, and user technical support positions to be funded at 2.5 FTE for up to $120,250 (Initial $10,000 would be included in this sum). |
Total additional long-term annual funding needs: $161,750
Total initial and long-term AZSite annual funding needs: $246,500
User Agreement Approval and Fee Collection Procedures
This is a brief overview of these procedures. More detailed information will accompany user agreement application forms and will be posted on the AZSite WWW site.
User agreements for access to the AZSite Cultural Resources Inventory will be made at the level of organizations or departments within organizations (e.g., CRM firms, archaeology divisions within CRM firms, government agencies, etc.) and signed by a responsible party within the organization. The organization or department receiving a user agreement is responsible for ensuring that the terms of the agreement are met, and for the proper use of any individual user accounts issued under that agreement. Sanctions for violating the terms of the user agreement (e.g., suspension or revocation of the agreement) will be made at the level of the organization or department signing the agreement.
Potential users will complete a user agreement and send it to the Arizona State Historic Preservation Office for review and approval. Upon approval, relevant user fees will be sent to the AZSite System Administrator's office at Arizona State University. After fee payment has been received, the appropriate user accounts will be activated. Funding will dispersed to other AZSite Consoritum member institutions according to the priorities outlined above.
Under the current proposed plan, user fees will be paid on an annual basis. A proposed fee structure is outlined below. These fees may be adjusted depending on the AZSite Consortium's success in obtaining additional funding and the costs of ensuring data quality and usability.
Proposed Initial User Fee Structure
The proposed fee structure takes into account the logistics of billing and managing user accounts along with estimated system costs. We currently favor a set of flat annual fees for access by users for an unlimited time within the year. To help maintain security and discourage individuals sharing user accounts (prohibited by the user agreement), no single user accounts will be offered. Our goal is to keep user fees as low as possible while providing a high quality, secure service; we will structure our fees according. However, we are making the initial, proposed fee structure public for the benefit of potential users who wish to begin to plan for use of the AZSite Cultural Resources Inventory.
User category |
accounts per user agreement |
estimated number in category* |
annual fee |
monthly fee per user |
Projected annual income |
| Small users | 3 |
38 |
$750 |
$21 |
$28,500 |
| Medium users | 9 |
6 |
$1,800 |
$17 |
$10,800 |
| Large users | unlimited |
17 |
$3,000 |
$13 |
$51,000 |
| Total fees | 61 |
$90,300 |
*User estimates are based on data from Arizona State Museum.
Proposed policy ON DATA ABOUT
ARCHAEOLOGICAL AND HISTORIC SITES ON tribal LANDS
AND THE AZSITE CULTURAL RESOURCE INVENTORY
AZSITE Consortium, October 1999
Background
For decades, the four members of the AZSITE Consortium—the Arizona State Museum, Arizona State University Department of Anthropology, the Museum of Northern Arizona, and the State Historic Preservation Office—have archived and managed information about archaeological and historic sites, and about archaeological surveys within the State of Arizona. This always has included information about sites on federal, state, tribal, municipal, and private land. These members have made this information available to bona fide archaeologists and cultural resource managers under their institutional policies and applicable State and Federal statutes. This information has been maintained and made available at the member institutions/agencies for the two related goals of preserving archaeological and historic resources and using these resources to gain a better understanding of the human past. Historically, the users of this information have regularly included archaeologists and historians from federal, state and local government; private cultural resource management agencies; representatives of tribal cultural resource offices; and trained archaeologist and historian researchers.
This site and survey information was originally collected and archived on paper and photographic media. In the last few decades, a subset of this information has been put into digital format at all the member institutions to improve their abilities to properly manage and more effectively use this information. Nevertheless, archiving archaeological and historic site data at four (and even more) institutions and in different data formats led to inevitable overlapping records, misrecorded sites, and other errors. It also made the effective use of the four data sets very difficult for bona fide users. In 1995 the four member institutions and agency entered into a formal agreement to share the information about archaeological and historic sites and surveys previously archived at each locale in a single database in order to better achieve the purposes for which this information was originally collected and maintained. This was the formation of the AZSITE Consortium.
This data sharing agreement involved information already archived (or being submitted for archiving) to the consortium members and data formats (i.e., digital) already being used for managing that information. While developing a master database to incorporate all participants’ data, the Consortium has held regular meetings to solicit input from potential users in federal, state, local, tribal, and private agencies. Meeting participants have raised concerns about security, access, quality, and intellectual property rights for this information. All of these concerns have been addressed by the consortium during the development of the AZSITE Cultural Resources Inventory over the past four years and many have been solved to the satisfaction of all concerned.
One set of concerns that has not yet been resolved involves information about archaeological and historic sites and surveys on tribal lands, that was archived and managed by consortium member institutions/agency prior to the formation of the AZSITE Consortium. Specifically, these concerns involve who should have access to these data, who should decide questions of access, and where and in what ways these data should be managed. Further, information about tribal sites and surveys have differing kinds of importance for different constituencies. For example, this information includes:
| information maintained and augmented, and often compiled, through the time and effort of the staffs of the institution/agency where they were originally archived; |
| information needed by the Historic Preservation Office to fulfill statutory obligations; |
| information comprising the cultural heritage of Native American tribes; |
| information collection paid for and/or permitted by federal (i.e., non-tribal) agencies; |
| and research data for scientists studying the human past. |
Furthermore, under Federal and State laws this information is deemed worthy of protection because it comprises the legacy of the human past important to all people. Several of these different constituencies have made at least informal claims of intellectual property rights over this information. These concerns have been the topic of numerous discussions between the consortium members, representatives of government agencies, tribal representatives, and other interested parties. Given the remaining concerns about sites and surveys on tribal lands, the AZSITE Consortium felt it wise to issue a policy statement outlining the consensus arrived at after several years of discussing this issue.
In establishing a policy toward information from archaeological and historic sites and surveys on tribal lands, the AZSITE Consortium has followed several guiding principals.
| The AZSITE Consortium is fundamentally an agreement and mechanism for sharing data among the member institutions/agency and disseminating it to relevant users (i.e., the AZSITE Cultural Resources Inventory). Hence, it does not have basis, legal or otherwise for deciding conflicting claims of intellectual hegemony over information contributed by the consortium members. Such claims are most appropriately settled at the level of the particular member institution or agency which originally archived and managed relevant data--often for decades. |
| The AZSITE Consortium has no statutory obligation to share or not share site and historic sites data with other institutions, and no statutory obligation to consult with any land manager about access policies to information about archaeological and historic sites and surveys on the land for which the manager is responsible. |
| Nevertheless, the AZSITE Consortium has come to a consensus agreement that it is to the benefit of land managers, users, and data contributors if the information made available in the AZSITE Cultural Resources Inventory is, to the extent possible, present with the common consent of the contributors and those responsible for the land on which the relevant sites are located. |
| The AZSITE Consortium does not have the legal authority to enforce cultural resource statutes or compel AZSITE users to comply with such statutes. However, it can prevent access to the Cultural Resources Inventory to any users misusing the information from the inventory in violation of a signed user agreement, or? of any applicable statutes, or in contravention of the purposes for which the information was compiled and shared by the member institutions/agency. |
| The AZSITE Consortium members contributed information from their own institutions/agency in good faith, for the benefit of the broader user constituency, often at considerable expense, and with the expectation that their own access to these same data would not be restricted. |
Policy
- Without express, official tribal permission, the AZSITE Consortium will not make available to AZSITE users via the AZSITE Cultural Resource Inventory information about sites on tribal lands.
- The AZSITE Cultural Resource Inventory comprises shared information contributed by AZSITE Consortium members, and all AZSITE Consortium institutions potentially have access to the master holding database. Access to any cultural resource information maintained internally by a member institution is governed by the policies of that institution and all applicable state and federal statutes. Hence, each AZSITE Consortium member will not release information in the holding database contributed by other member institutions, to the extent that it can be determined, about archaeological and historic sites on tribal lands without the express permission of the source institution or agency.
- However, it is not the responsibility of the AZSITE Consortium to ensure compatibility between the AZSITE Cultural Resources Inventory and cultural resources data sets independently maintained by tribes or other institutions. Nor is it the responsibility of the AZSITE Consortium to ensure that data not contributed to the AZSITE Cultural Resources Inventory is made available to local, state, or federal agencies responsible for compliance with statues and regulations pertaining to cultural resource management.