[-empyre-] Welcome to February - Preserving our Online Heritage.

["Melinda Rackham" <melinda@subtle.net>]

To save or not to save?

This is a perennial  question when faced with a massive expanse of online
data and limited resources with which to do it. The preservation of
contemporary media art works presents an enormous challenge to collectors
and museums, most of whom are still attempting to fit these diverse
practices into their rationales and exhibition strategies. Unfortunately in
the art world acquisition and conservation measures are only happening in
small pockets,  despite the plethora of entertaining, challenging and
innovative online works produced over the past decade.

However there is hope. Some of the leaders in preservation of internet art
are not in fact art institutions, but libraries and internet archival
projects, for whom collection, archiving and preservation is a routine
matter. As more of their collections become digital, they have been actively
addressing issues like storage, migration and emulation.

This month we welcome our panel of International experts from the archival
field:

---> Margaret Phillips, Paul Koerbin and Gerard Clifton from the PANDORA
internet archive and PADI gateway at the National Library of Australia;
---> Nancy McGovern, Digital Preservation Officer at Cornell University
Library;
---> Michele Kimpton of the Internet Archive with its consultant sage the
WayBack Machine;
---> Sharmin (Tinni) Choudhury, the software engineer for PANIC digital
preservation project;
---> Meta data standards expert Dr Simon Pockley from Flight of Ducks and
Deakin University; and
---> Luciana Duranti (UBC), Yvette Hackett and Jim Suderman from InterPARES
2, Canada.

We will also be joined by those concerned specifically with net art:
--->  New York-based artist and writer Kevin McGarry who manages Rhizome
Artbase - the worlds largest collection of networked media containing over
1400 net.art works;
 --->  and artist Graham Crawford, who curated two of Australia's earliest
net art shows, Tool1 and Tool 2.0b in 1995 and 1996, which are no longer
online.


Please enjoy and feel free to jump into this discussion on  the tenuousness
and a tenacity of networked histories and records, the critical distinction
between object and events based archiving and what happens to an archive
when funding disappears?


___________archival project urls:

Internet Archive and WayBack Machine: http://www.archive.org/

InterPARES 2 (IP2)- International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in
Electronic Systems: http://www.interpares.org/welcome.cfm

Preserving Access to Digital Information (PADI): http://www.nla.gov.au/padi/

PANDORA Australia's Web Archive: http://pandora.nla.gov.au/.

PANIC - Preservation webservices Architecture for Newmedia and Interactive
Collections: http://www.metadata.net/panic/

Virtual Remote Control (VRC) at Cornell University:
http://irisresearch.library.cornell.edu/VRC/index.html


________ online art urls:

Flight of Ducks - a personal preservation project
http://www.duckdigital.net/FOD/FOD0292.html

Rhizome ArtBase: http://rhizome.org/art

Tool1 and Tool 2.0b are no longer online, however we are attempting to
reconstruct them before the end of the month.


Dr Melinda Rackham
artist | curator | producer
www.subtle.net/empyre
-empyre-  media forum