Unless I read it wrong, they have a grant of some £950,000 (!) effectively to re-collate information that is already collected elsewhere (and they provide a list of source reference websites and books to use).

And they want unpaid, and possibly unqualified volunteers to do the work for them???

Sometimes I totally fail to understand peoples attitudes. The negativity here is astounding. Why aren't you celebrating this news?

A university has secured a large grant to survey a certain class of prehistoric monument (you like those, don't you?) over a 4 year period and they would like prehistory enthusiasts (thats you isn't it?) to be involved, together with researchers and PhD students in creating a central resource which will help everybody better understand the sites and, im sure, break new ground in the process.

Sniping about how much money they'e been given.. If they were given £50,000 and refused help from enthusiasts you'd be saying how typical it is that something like this is under funded and how insular the profession/academics are.
The paranoia is just bizarre.

If you don't like it, if its "donkey work" to you, don't contribute, but I would be willing to bet heavily you'll use it when its done!
Perhaps you need several tenners in a plain envelope before you'll contribute? Or perhaps its all a bit too serious?

In all honesty, its probably a lot easier to sit at home with a cup of tea and trawl the internet for information other people have actually bothered to go out and get, and then post it on TMA, proclaiming some sort of relevance in the process.

I'll be contributing to it. So when you use the resource to read about a site i've gone out and collected data on, don't forget to thank me will you.