#Paper Session 6: Arts and Preservation (Hogan)
Chair: Aileen O'Carroll, Policy Manager at DRI, Manager IQDA at Maynooth University @aaocarroll
####Preserving born digital art: lessons from artists' practice
Conor McGarrigle, University of Denver @_stunned
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_art
Preservation of 'network art'. Spook a network art project from 1999. A conceptual art project which tracked a military server as it crawled the web.
Network artists thought their work was ephemeral, but galleries etc wanted off-line versions for display etc.
Tech wasn't hard to encode: html, javascript, flash, flash files, java applets
But how to preserve the feel of the artwork - not high res in today's terms, was experienced through crt monitors etc.
Biggest issue is that most of the content was on external servers - places like GeoCities that don't exist anymore.
Referenced Art Projects:
Should these projects be preserved? Is it possible or even worthwhile without context?
Lots of interesting questions, not so many answers to how to preserve this stuff.
####Performances, preservation and policy implications: digital curation and preservation awareness and strategy in the performing arts
Laura Molloy, University of Glasgow @LM_HATII
Documentation is not archiving.
- 12 practitioner interviews with self-employed performing artists:
- 10 use digital objects in their performance, and there is an economic benefit to the use of these objects.
- 11 believe they preserve their own work, 8 of these think documentation and putting stuff in a box is preservation.
####Mass Digitisation of Arts Archives: The Abbey Theatre Digitisation Project
Martin Bradley, NUI Galway archives.ie
Aising Keane, NUI Galway @AislingNiC
Wonderful project, pity about the access restrictions.
The size of the collection to be digitised strongly influenced the decisions aroung tech and process. Needed to do ~600 pages per day.
Most useful equipment: DSLR, tripod, light set.
Influenced by the journal article More Product, Less Process by Greene and Meissner which argues that because there are many more archives than will ever be described / processed that archivists should adjust methodology.
Project will probably hold 40TB upon completion.
Stored on Amazon S3. DAMS - Aetopia, Leeds University.
Metadata:
Abbey have already created a db from their theatre programmes.
Legal Restrictions:
IP, copyright.
- theatre contains unique work by 100's, maybe 1000's of people not just the Abbey.
- Data Protection: a lot of personal information in the archives -names and numbers etc. Attempted to remove this with OCR.