[Air-l] Preserving our Online Heritage | February on -empyre-

[Michael Arnold Mages]

To save or not to save?
Preserving our Online Heritage.

The preservation of contemporary networked 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 acquisition and conservation measures are sparse, despite the
plethora of entertaining challenging and innovative online works produced
over the past decade.
 
However the 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 of storage, migration and emulation.
 
This month we are joined by a panel of International experts from the
archival field:  Nancy McGovern, Digital Preservation Officer at Cornell
University Library; Margaret Phillips, Paul Koerbin and Gerard Clifton from
the PANDORA internet archive and PADI gateway at the National Library of
Australia; 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 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: Kevin
McGarry from Rhizome Artbase, the worlds largest collection of networked
media with over 1440 net.art works; and artist Graham Crawford, who curated
two of Australia¹s earliest net art shows Tool 1 and Tool 2.0b which are no
longer online. Our guests will discuss 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?  

Please join us at ­empyre- http://www.subtle.net/empyre  in February for
this critical discussion on archiving our online art history.


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/

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.

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



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