Oya Y. Rieger
Associate University Librarian, Scholarly Resources & Preservation Services
Cornell University
Mickey Casad
Curator for Digital Scholarship & Associate Curator
The Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art
Cornell University
Dianne Dietrich
Digital Scholarship and Preservation Services Fellow & Physics & Astronomy Librarian
Cornell University
Through a National Endowment for the Humanities-funded initiative, Cornell University Library is creating a technical, curatorial, and managerial framework for preserving access to complex born-digital new media objects. The Library’s Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art provides the testbed for this project, with its collections of complex interactive born-digital artworks used by students, faculty, and artists. Many of these works are currently unplayable on contemporary operating systems. The presentation will describe the project’s findings and discoveries, focusing on a user survey conducted with the aim of creating user profiles and use cases for born-digital assets like those in the testbed collection. The project’s ultimate goal is to create a preservation and access practice grounded in thorough and practical understanding of the characteristics of digital objects and their access requirements, seen from the perspectives of collection curators and users alike. We will discuss how the survey findings inform longer-term preservation strategies for the project at hand, as well as how these strategies might translate to other kinds of complex born-digital collections.
http://blogs.cornell.edu/dsps/2014/07/30/interactive-digital-media-art-survey-key-findings-and-observations/
http://blogs.cornell.edu/dsps/2015/02/11/digital-archaeology-and-forensics/