Research Consortia in Digital Heritage Research: The ‘Archiving Australian Media Arts’ Project and Beyond

Drawing on more than fifteen years’ experience leading multi-disciplinary digital heritage research projects, I will reflect on the quite remarkable consortium that has undertaken the work of the Archiving Australian Media Arts: Towards a Method and a National Collection ARC Linkage Project, and offer an assessment of the utility of a ‘consortial approach’ more generally in born digital cultural heritage research.

Which born-digital material is designated the status of heritage? How does this process of “heritigatization” occur? This paper focuses on the period between the installation of the first web server in Australia and the commencement of Australia’s collaborative web archiving program, PANDORA (October 1996)…

For those active in transgender-focused Usenet groups during the 1990s up to the mid-2000s, few regular posters were as infamous as Laura Blake. Best known for her prolific and pugnacious posting style, Blake engaged in frequent, extended flame wars with her ideological opponents…

How well has The Wayback Machine archived Chinese-Language webpages from the late 1990s and early 2000s? Chinese-speaking users account for more than 20% of the world’s online population. Yet, most existing work  focuses on English-language content…

Focusing on the Play It Again: Preserving Australian Videogame History of the 1990s. this paper assesses the quality of user interactions once games are made playable using Emulation-as-a-Service and Emulation-as-a-Service Infrastructure…

The goal of the Game and Interactive Software Scholarship Toolkit (GISST), a US National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) funded project, is to develop a framework for the citation and sharing of emulated states and input streams for collaborative study and institutional use…

HitNet (Hi! Türkiye Network) – the only Turkish BBS to have a publicly accessible archive – offers a case study of the challenges associated with collecting, preserving and researching BBS archives in Turkey…

The architecture industry’s pursuit of innovation and widespread adoption of various software tools for documentation, rendering, animation, and the integration of virtual reality (VR) and augmented reality (AR) raises specific challenges for preservation…

A reflection on the successes, difficulties, and limitations encountered in preserving and emulating a curated selection of 50 game titles for the Play It Again: Preserving Australian Video Game History of the 1990s project and the implications for access and exhibition…

Digital preservation is rarely a simple, linear endeavour. Preserving and providing access to the Josef Stanislaus Ostoja-Kotkowski archive held at the State Library of South Australia revealed that emulation was not the simplest solution…

Legal barriers are one of the biggest obstacles to the effective preservation of complex and interactive digital content, including video games. The Digital Preservation Coalition (DPC) has established a task force to address these challenges…

How do you preserve archives collaboratively, simultaneously and at scale while also ensuring artists’ intent in reimagined exhibition displays? This paper traces ACMI’s collaborative acquisition and preservation workflow for contemporary Australian videogames with reference to select examples…

EaaSI could make games playable in a browser on the open web or in a museum intranet setting. Driving-games, however, pose particular diificulties with their different requirements for sound and graphics cards…

What does it mean to ‘preserve’ a software-based artwork within digital preservation systems? A case study from the Art Gallery of New South Wales, Digital Preservation team’s evaluation of fifteen artworks using a PREMIS metadata framework…

Questions of how to best capture the artwork and bridge the gap between technnical infrastructure, artist’s intent and preservation needs are considered in relation to three artworks recently displayed in the newly built North Building at AGNSW…

Confronting yet another new practice of computing in AI, another revolutionary infrastructure in the form of quantum computing, and the very possible end of the era of online platform dominance (with everything that implies for archiving), the mutual dependence of software and hardware has never been clearer or more urgent, or raised so many questions about the emotional and ethical demands of archival practice…

The Variable Media Initiative and the Matters in Media Art collaboration in between MoMA, SFMOMA, and Tate offered foundational ideas that have been successfully applied to preservation challenges in museums and archives and they remain influential today. This presentation will review some of these ideas in the light of more recent developments in software preservation and digital art conservation. 

The media technical ecosystem of software-based artworks that ZKM started collecting in 1989 is dying. The potential collapse of this ecosystem with the escalation of disappearing components requires preservation strategies that embrace technological discontinuities…

Three software-based artworks by Singaporean artist Ho Tzu Nyen recently acquired by SAM illustrate the critical challenges for evaluating if software can be modified without compromising the artwork’s identity…

How do artist’s respond once their born-digital works are not only preserved but also emulated and potentially re-exhibited? Interviews with artists with three works in  Griffith’s CD-Rom collection offer insights…

What does adopting a lens of change in the museum archival practices reveal when applied to one of the most significant Changeable objects in Australian social history, an operational version of the CSIRO Wireless LAN Testbed – ie: the beginning of WiFi…

What are the thresholds of failure in collections care and display, and what happens after failure? The exhibition incident report can act as critical device for writing failure into the histories of digital exhibitions…

What does it mean for an artwork to become deactivated? Has it reached the end of its life and moved into an afterlife where only its memory and physical form remains? Or can it be given, metaphorically, new life through conservation methods?

The Digital Curation team at the State Library of New South Wales offers a case study, outlining the experience of transferring the contents from over 1,000 carriers to network storage, lessons learned, and next steps required for preservation and access…

The National Collection for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning, Nieuwe Instituut (NI) manages one of the largest architecture collections in the world, and the management of its growing born-digital collection is raising important questions for the histories of architecture and design practices…

A three-month long research project  in the V&A’s Design and Digital department in 2023 explored intersecting concerns between curatorial aims and conservation needs of digital objects at the point of acquisition…