| Summary: | Issue 9 opened in November 2000 with a 'special section' consisting of 7 articles on Near Eastern Petrology edited by Louise Joyner from the British Museum (described in more detail in her editorial). Rather than the restricted number of black and white images commonly found in more traditional publications, all 7 articles include full colour petrographic images of pottery from around the Eastern Mediterranean, demonstrating the opportunity offered in this medium for archaeologists to portray their data in more detail and much more effectively than can usually be done in print. One article also made use of QuickTime rotating images, illustrating the optical effects of rotation of thin sections on the microscope stage, vitually allowing us to step into the shoes of the specialist. The issue continued into December with the publication of excavations of the Roman site at Brough-on-Humber. This article was commissioned by York Archaeological Trust and prepared by Internet Archaeology to explore the electronic publication of archaeological excavation reports. The complete report is published alongside the context dataset, the pottery dataset and the 'small finds' catalogue. Comments on the balance that has been struck between the needs of the general reader and the specialist in this case are especially welcome, but hopefully will not eclipse the importance of the site in light of its conclusions about the status of the Roman town and the discovery of a hitherto unrecognised pottery industry in the region. As all of the articles in this issue witness, modern excavation and fieldwork survey inevitably creates large quantities of computer-generated information, either during fieldwork or in the assessment, analysis or dissemination stages of any project. Depending on the nature of the research, but mirroring traditional practice, archaeological data can go straight into a digital archive (for those who want access to the raw data, like specialists) or, at the other end of the spectrum, can be published in an electronic journal like Internet Archaeology. To a degree and for many valid reasons, Internet Archaeology has, up until now, maintained the division between digital archive and publication, but we have realised that we may actually be missing the opportunity to create an integrated archive, where all the available raw data is fully articulated with the text of the report, and where users would be able to query the entire range of data through a variety of interfaces (Richards and Robinson, 2000, sect 3.2). The beginnings of this kind of dissemination have been found in the journal since its inception (see for example: Tomlinson and Hall, Tyers, Peacey, Dungworth, Snyder, Perkins, Wickham-Jones and Dalland, Vollbrecht, Hunter-Mann et al.), but we are now developing our already close relationship with the Archaeology Data Service, and have started to explore the reality of the integrated archive. The final article in issue 9 by Martin Millett and colleagues has allowed us to put these ideas into practice.
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