Each year the National Film and Sound Archive runs a Digital Directions Symposium to explore key issues in the preservation sector. What do we collect? How do we do it? How will it be used? Get it wrong and we have no heritage, or hide it in deep caves beneath a bureaucratic dragon. 

This year the GLAM (gallery, library, archive, museum) sector focused on the users of digital collections. The users, advocates and professionals in the screen archival community were also keen to see Jan Müller, the new CEO of the NFSA, in action for the first time. 

The entire proceedings are available here as a video, opening with his keynote address. 

Dominic Case, an expert in post production and a passionate advocate of archiving, has written two articles about the proceedings. Here is the first...

http://bit.ly/2xxHXH4
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If the morning session had been about how users discover and use collections, the afternoon session was to focus on how institutions make their collections available. As it turned out, each session would show how blurred this distinction has become.

Users are the experts

Ross Harley, Dean of Art and Design at UNSW described yet another research tool – Design Art Australia Online (DAAO) – which provides access to over 10,000 biographies – and works - of artists and designers. The data is open-source, and editable by users (in the style of Wikipedia, one of many other data sources that DAAO interacts with). Harley echoed a truth that most institutions are discovering – that their users often know more than their own 'experts'.  

http://bit.ly/2yWSo8q
http://bit.ly/2yWSo8q+