Digital Preservation Coalition

Leo Konstantelos (Glasgow University): Digital Art Online - perspectives on user needs, access, documentation and retrieval

Notes by Kristy Davis ... Discussed his project to explore digital arts need for documentation and retrieval with a user-orientated approach. Looked at digital art as learning and research material and investigated practices of digital art resources.  Some issues found in this research are that digital art records modern culture for future scholars, dissemination methods often bypass traditional channels of memory institutions, there are huge collections of digital art in dedicated online resources, are museum and art galleries the sole arbiters of value and who are the scholarly users of this material and what are their needs? Conducted a case study of online digital art resources to examine variables and found that mission statements generally promoted community interaction, occasionally engaged a community of digital art users and rarely emphasized the educational research value of digital art. Found that there were inconsistencies in documentation, especially with description and technical metadata which was left to the artists; discretionary use of elements with no mandatory fields with mostly system generated, resource – specific data and that only two of the resources used formal metadata standards (RHIZOM/DAMS) and the rest relied on ad hoc methods and social tagging. In the digital art market network sale and profit is valued over scholarly value and it is difficult to keep track of artefacts without contacting the artist/creator, who sometimes goes by a nickname, since there is no reference or contact details attached. In search and discovery of digital art resources, four out of sixteen resources were optimized for search engine exposure of the collections and the sorting of the collections items was mostly based on community related criteria. Other issues to address with online digital art resources are access rights, information on creator, requirements to view the work, genre, software and hardware specifications and a history of changes to the original work. Notes that conservation starts at creation. Mentioned the role of cultural heritage institutions crating good practice guidelines that extend to digital art and highlighted the Planets Report on Emerging Digital Art Characterization, the POCOS Project and the KEEP Project. The educational value of digital art online resources can be established through synchronizing art and museum efforts and that preservation signifies long-term access.

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