Dennis, I feel your pain. Unfortunately, I'm guessing the demographic you're writing for--the reviewers, if not the readers, of the journal--represent three disciplines that don't always play well together. The party at the intersection of new media, art, and libraries is still getting started.
A couple of years in art school and a decade of touring artsy twenty-somethings and blue-blooded sixty-somethings through media art at the Guggenheim has convinced me that much of the art world's protagonists and audience were drawn to it because they didn't want to have anything to do with science. While many of us on CRUMB know artists whose technical savvy rivals a Google engineer's, in my experience the spear carriers of the art world tend to be technophobes. Many would rather retreat to their racks of paintings or shelves of illuminated manuscripts than figure out how to set a ringtone on their smartphone. 
I'm grateful that these intelligent people are spending their time scrutinizing our rich analog heritage, but in so doing they are also dooming themselves to an increasingly narrow sphere of relevance. As James Bridle wrote on Wednesday, "those who cannot understand technology are doomed to be consumed by it":
http://booktwo.org/notebook/new-aesthetic-politics/
I can rattle off a dozen digital history projects, from number-crunching social networks in medieval Florence to TEI accounts of marginalia in Schopenhauer essays. So why can't I think off-hand of a single digital humanities project in art history? (No, Google Art Project doesn't count.)
The struggle to bridge the art world and the digerati may be compounded in Dennis's case by the difficulty librarians have grasping the complexity of media art objects. Don't get me wrong: librarians have done far better than art conservators or museum collection managers at promoting standards for and access to their collections. But the tidy metadata standards of most libraries split at the seams if you try to shoehorn in something that doesn't have pages and a spine.
Of course, it's not just librarians who mistake preserving documents for preserving experience. I love the New York Times comment dismissing the difficulty of restoring Douglas Davis' sentence because "it's just an HTML file." On today's Web, an HTML document is less a "page" than connective tissue that assembles hundreds of shards of media, code, and text gathered from dispersed locations. Saying a Web site is an HTML file is like saying a house is a box of nails.
This situation sounds depressing, but fortunately there are some places where the icy walls separating the art world, libraries, and new media are beginning to thaw. Venerable institutions like the Library of Congress and Smithsonian are beginning to tackle the problem of software preservation, and techniques from the wild like emulation have made their way first into museums and now into libraries as well. Sebastian Chan put the Cooper-Hewitt's collection on Github. Here's a recent report:
http://www.blog.still-water.net/2013/05/the-ex-files-how-long-will-our-software-last/
More articles by people like Dennis--and more conversations, uncomfortable as they may be, with people unlike him--should help.
jon
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On Jun 12, 2013, Dennis Moser <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> It is with a certain sense of irony that I read these recent postings on
> these works and the challenges of their preservation and conservation.
> 
> Why? I'm wrapping up an article for a certain US journal for art libraries,
> trying to draw attention to these very kinds of works and their associated
> problems. It's gone out for review twice now, because two of the three
> reviewers in the first round couldn't wrap their heads around the fact that
> such works were being created and collected.
> 
> I'm grateful for the journal editor's support and determination to get my
> article in print. But the experience has left me wondering just who is
> paying attention to these things (New Aesthetic? What's that? and why
> should we care?) ...