MCN 2024

With support from Institute of Museum and Library Services, the Internet Archive is expanding ARCH - a web-based computational research platform so that it can streamline gallery, library, archive, and museum ability to support a wide range of users interested in working with museums collections at scale. Museum specific collection functionality includes but is not limited to AI and ML driven methods that enable to speech to text, artwork color analysis, and transcription of text found in photographs. The Internet Archive's development efforts on ARCH are directly informed by partners at the Indianapolis Museum of Art and the Williams College Museum of Art. In this presentation representatives from the project will provide an update on the ARCH development roadmap, new functionality such as its ability to help users easily leverage AI and machine learning with museum collections, as well as a call for broader museum participation in ARCH development and use.

This session will introduce brand new preservation guidance for new media art/digital media art/time-based media art/variable media art and facilitate exercises from “Maintenance Culture: Sustaining Access to Digital Creative Works,” a Myriad project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). Maintenance Culture aims to provide practical, realistic guidelines to support small to mid-sized art museums, history museums, museums at academic institutions, and other cultural heritage institutions who steward complex, born-digital, creative works.

The session will introduce participants to the structure and content of the Maintenance Culture guidelines, including describing some specific examples to illustrate the types of works this project addresses (digital design, time-based media art, augmented reality, and net art) and their common preservation challenges. Facilitators will provide structure for the small group work within the session, with the goal of connecting participants to each other and encouraging the growth of communities of practice around preserving digital creative works.

Presenter will facilitate exercises from the Maintenance Culture workbook (to be published July 2024), including:
• Identifying institutional strengths that support maintaining long-term access to born-digital, creative works
• Naming challenges to collecting and preserving complex, born-digital creative works and connecting with others experiencing similar challenges
• Taking steps towards drafting workflows for collecting and maintaining complex, born-digital works