Hello Sarah, and list,

First of all, I would like to say that I am by no means an archive
expert, but because of a recent project which aim at providing a live
archive and mapping of the free software and art "scene", some of us in
GOTO10 are now discovering this nice can of worm that is archiving :)


Sarah Cook said :
> Aymeric Mansoux at GOTO10: do you think the idea of 'open-sourcing'  
> documentation tasks, by distributing them to the makers/developers, is a 
> good solution?

I am not sure to understand "open-sourcing" in the context of your
question...

If you meant outsourcing documentation tasks by distributing them to the
makers/developers, then I would say that I think this is already
happening regularly. The project/artwork documentation is often produced
by the artist, and if not produced directly at least directed or edited.
I also believe that because of the nature of some works of (new) media
art and the way they are
exhibited/shown/called/commissioned/hosted/distributed/etc today, the
documentation often remains the only way to evaluate a work, it is also
the only place where some statements and underlying concepts can be
developed and communicated further. As such documentation could be seen
as an as equally important manifestation of a work, and too often, more
important than the work itself leaving the artwork as a proof of concept
or side effect of an artistic intention, even if this was not meant to
be like this. As a consequence if documentation has such a predominant
place, and if documentation material are usually the easiest thing to
archive, well then, nothing to worry about we are already archiving with
high fidelity the (new) media art scene ;) And to quote back Annet's
mail with the "darwinistic archiving" phenomenon, I think we are all
aware that this already happening.

In my opinion, approaching the problem of the archive goes well beyond
the sole issue of collecting records, or issues related to the
preservation of a work and its documentation: it should also aim at
explaining how these works/records ended up in such an archive in the
first place, in which context and following which selection process,
that is why I find more valuable archives that are part of a focused
research and documentation effort. And maybe, a good documentary on
<some-artistic-genre> or a good piece of writing will have much more
value than "just" an archived work of this genre? Basically anything
that adds contextual data might reveal more information on a work than
the work itself in it original or emulated/ported form. I would find
very difficult to only stick to a strict approach of archiving with
works that increasingly build their meaning and in some case use
information from a very specific state of our connected society for
example.  Said differently, if we have to project ourselves in a short
time jump of a hundred years, what would be the value of an archive
containing a few lines of code that can manipulate some twitter feeds if
not linked with something that would explain and illustrate the social
and technological networked behaviours of our present days? Not much I
suppose...

To come back on the notion of open source, and more generally FLOSS, I
think the strength of such an approach is not necessarily in open
sourcing or freeing a work at the moment, but we should simply make
everything to extend the shelf life of the archive system itself. After
all, sooner or later, an archive will have to face the problem of its
own archiving.  Today we have lived through enough digital information
history to look back behind us and be able to demonstrate that
proprietary standards are the best way to lock your data and make it
obsolete/unusable on a very short time. Open standards and format should
be preferred at any cost.  In the end, if on the one hand the
preservation and archive of a work is still a per-case problem, on the
other hand, the toolkit and the structure that forms all the metadata of
this work can be common and shared with every archives, as such there is
no need to reinvent the wheel or come up with new systems all the time.
I could not imagine a reason why archiving effort, institutional or not
would not follow a general guideline on formats and standards to use for
this matter and this would not affect the way the archive can be
accessed, visualised or browsed. I would be interested to know if anyone
involved with archiving on this list are taking into consideration these
things following which recommandations, or have ever tried to develop
such a guideline with several other organisations/institution/groups
instead of using in-house knowledge/resources?

Another thing that is worth mentionning maybe, and I might make a
few on this list roar (or cry), that with the direction the Internet and
network storage is taking today with the increasing ability to dig and
cache data in 2 dimensions (location and time/revision), is archiving as
a human-led centralised practice has any future?



a.