Reports and the grey documents are important information sources about archaeological activities, sites and artefacts. Still, most archaeological information systems are designed to administrate collections and information from single excavations.
The main source to artefact information in Norway is the verbose acquisition catalogues published since 1850. DOK has since 1992 been working on databases for the Norwegian archaeological museums, see CAA'95, CAA'96. In 1992 we decided to consider the grey documents as first class. Since 1990 30 000 printed pages spanning 170 years have been converted to SGML/XML documents. The encoded texts combined with large indexed facsimile databases constitute the backbone of the system.
In the recent years there has been an increasing awareness of the importance of including grey documents in databases e.g. at CAA2001.
The text encoding techniques enabled the creation of reliable relational databases gave the users an opportunity to work directly with the source material via electronic text archive for both the document collections. This makes it possible to study these as individual historical objects. Through the encoding the texts according to a CIDOC-CRM-like ontology we have laid ground for describing the museums' history and the history of archaeology and for continually updating of these.