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Welcome to the point-b_ank wiki!

Point B_ank

The open source artifact catalogue management system

Point blank (pblank) was a project that I suggested to the Winter-Term 371 Class in 2024. It was a side project that I was excited to get started on, but did not have the time to. Thanks to them, I had a strong launching point (the Projectile Point Project or "PCubed"). This wiki will grow as development on the platform continues.

Motivation

Many projectile points and other artifacts in Saskatchewan (And likely elsewhere) are currently held by individuals with personal/private collections. They may have accumulated a number of points through a history of agriculture, or could simply be hobbiests that search for artifacts outright - in either case, public facing solutions to cataloguing artifacts are slim to none. There are some sites that help with identification and somewhat serve as a catalouge (i.e. projectile-points.net) but these are filled with shaky data and lack uniformity. Not to mention the fact that their catalogue update process is handled via email... Whats more is that if there were a way to analyze all of the data from these private collections, it could be incredibly beneficial to enhancing the archaeological record!

What we have tried to make in point blank is an open source cataloguing system for artifacts. We strive to find a balance between customization and data uniformity, we also focus on providing useful features to users like using aggregated statistics over certain subsets of the collection, as opposed to simply hard-coding details in HTML (looking at you projectilepoints.net). The project is still in its infancy but in time we hope that it can be of use to collectors of all sorts.

Roadmap

• Conversion from js to ts - typescript is just easier to maintain and nicer to work with. It also pairs nicely with the point below...
• Substitute postgres DB for mongodb - Mongo just plays so nice with javascript flavoured languages/frameworks. Plus, we plan to extend this to handle more than simply projectile points in the future. Something flexible would be nice!
• Access Control - Control who can see certain catalogues/sites that live on your server!
• Identification Workflow - Have a point that you're unsure about? One feature we are excited to implement is a point-identification wizard that allows users to narrow down their choices based on how much (or how little) of an artifact they have found.