you’re probably already sick of hearing about the ins and outs of the geek in residence, but i’ve only got 3 more weeks to go, so you’ll just have to suffer.
lucky for you, this week was a quiet week – it’s been all about the archive.
i have had the awesome help and conspiring company of cherie, the super-rad intern here and together we’ve been plugging away at transferring content.
there is a massive archive of information currently on the gallery’s site that we need to transfer and sometimes it’s all about copy and paste. setting up a migration tool was going to be too intense and too much of a time constraint.
as it turns out, working through the archive of the old site has been an amazing opportunity for me to understand the organisation and its history. i feel like the essence of a gallery or similar organisation can really be reflected through its living archive. our aim from the beginning has been to bring that surface.
i have learned some of the best ways to approach digital archiving and preserve links and integrity for this small organisation, which is really about self-containment. i can’t imagine the archiving nightmare of a more complex site, with e-commerce, etc.
digital archiving is a massive deal that places like the national library, educational libraries and the australia council are all over. archiving for media art is a massive can of worms and it’s one that westspace will benefit from in the future – there is an extensive archive of documentation and digital publications (CD-ROMs) that is going to be a whole project in and of itself.
long after i’m gone 🙂