Past Perfect in Underwater Contexts

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Ongoing Care and Study Through a Digital Catalogue of Port Royal", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

The various features and affordability of PastPerfect make it a popular choice for thousands of museums and archives. Besides small patches, the software has not released an updated version since 2010 and is quickly falling behind modern archaeology. Mass editing is difficult, and search functions are non-intuitive. These pose a large problem when dealing with nautical artifacts, due to their niche categorizations. In a program like PastPerfect, the magnitude of options causes entries to become lost in a virtual shuffle. Furthermore, the terms provided by the nomenclature lack relevance to nautical archaeology. A modern, more user-friendly interface is necessary in our rapidly growing world of maritime collections. Drawing on my experience digitizing the Port Royal collection, I will examine the uses and possible updates to the PastPerfect program to postulate software that can accommodate the specific needs of underwater archaeology.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Ongoing Care and Study Through a Digital Catalogue of Port Royal   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow