Jon,
Thank you for this — it articulates several of the concerns that I have
tried to (and continue) raise. We'll see how things go when it gets into
print!
I especially like the point you raise about the tension between preserving
the "item" and not preserving the "experience" of it. I have alluded to
this previously by reminding my friends in IT that "the back-up is NOT an
archive" (a significant, yet oft-unseen/acknowledged, portion of the
archivist's role in the process is to establish and communicate the context
of the item, thus approaching the "experience" of it).
I would, however, be remiss if I didn't point out that librarians have, in
fact, been trying to get beyond the idea that metadata is simply about
"pages and spines." :) ... looks like my other work is still not done ...
we are not your great grandfather's librarians. I think it may be the
image that the greater populace holds of librarians that obscures the
significant work done by librarians and archivists in the creation and
application of metadata for non-book materials. I was deeply appreciative
of the Archivists Roundtable of Metropolitan New York and the symposium
(2011) that addressed the issues surrounding artists' records in archival
collections — again, there's needs to be more of these kinds of
conversations across the disciplines.
Best,
Dennis
~~
If your first move is brilliant, you’re in trouble. You don’t really know
how to follow it; you’re frightened of ruining it. So, to make a mess is a
good beginning. — Brian Eno
On Fri, Jun 14, 2013 at 6:03 AM, Jon Ippolito <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> 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
> ______________________________
> It's not too late to catch up to the 21st century
> Digital Curation online certificate
> http://DigitalCuration.UMaine.edu
>
>
> 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?) ...
>
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