Environmental archaeologist appointed to the Steering Committee of the Swedish National Data Service (SND)
NEWS
Philip Buckland, Senior Lecturer in Environmental Archaeology and Deputy Head at the Department of Historical, Philosophical and Religious Studies at Umeå University, has been appointed as a member of the steering committee of the Swedish National Data Service (SND).
Philip Buckland is director of SEAD (The Strategic Environmental Archaeology Database) a national research e-infrastructure for archaeological sciences. He also has considerable experience of database development, management and usage, transgressing the boundaries of the humanities and natural sciences.
An early interest for databases, including a systems development focused A-level in Computer Studies, has subsequently grown into involvement in a number of international database projects.
These include systems for the management and analysis of natural science data in archaeology as well as those for climate and environmental science, and often involve HUMlab as a development and networking platform.
He has recently received a large networking and planning grant from the American National Science Foundation (NSF), as co-PI with colleagues from the USA and Scotland, for working towards a cyber-infrastructure for the “Transdisciplinary Research and Visualization of the Long-Term Human Ecodynamics of the North Atlantic”.
SND is a service organization for Swedish research in the humanities, social sciences and medicine, and facilitates national and international access to existing data. Anders Bränström, Umeå, is chairman of the Steering Committee.
SND’s mission includes, among other things:
The archiving, quality assurance and documentation of research databases
Facilitating research access to databases
Providing advice and information to researchers
Participating in international database networks
Cooperating in the development and construction of databases
