US collectors to adopt British recording methods?

An announcement on the Britarch discussion list caught my eye. Gary Brun one of the organizers of the United Kingdom Detector Finds Database (UKDFD) announced yesterday that “a few American archaeologists (sic) and one other country will be using our data model. So here's to the USDFD”. Indeed it is good news that portable artefact collectors on the other side of the Atlantic are beginning to see the need and find the means to record the provenance of items in their collections and make the information available to researchers as archaeologists have been advocating for a long time. What a shame however it is that it is the rather sketchy (but through that perhaps more user-friendly) UKDFD data model they have adopted rather than the more detailed Portable Antiquities Scheme one. After all Roger Bland of the PAS gave three ACCG-sponsored talks over there in the past year apparently promoting the PAS as a model which could be followed elsewhere.