In the summer of 2021, my friend and colleague Caroline Gil & I taught a two-day workshop on disk imaging for the media archiving team at the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC). The workshop focused on the process of disk imaging physical media: the hardware and software involved, quality assurance procedures for disk images, and, of course, use cases for disk images in a museum collection.
Read MoreWe got our first set of dpx files at the Hirshhorn back in December. I was really excited about developing a workflow for processing the files, especially in light of the development of Media Area’s new RAWcooked tool. Sure it was a lot of data, but I was ready. How bad could it be? And so began a two month process full of frustration and disappointment.
Read MoreThere are many applications to choose from when deciding to create a disk image. As a part of developing the disk imaging workflow at the Hirshhorn, five common disk imaging applications were tested. These applications were chosen based partly on the media conservation team’s familiarity with these tools, as well as their prevalence in the field of digital preservation. In order to assess the performance of different disk imaging software, the same 32GB USB 3 Samsung flash drive, containing 2.42GB of data in a FAT32 file system was imaged using ddrescue (v.1.24), Guymager (v.0.8.8), FTK Imager for Mac (v.3.1.1 CLI), FTK Imager for Windows (v.3.2.4.6), and Tableau Forensic Imager (v.1.2.1).
Read MoreThe Denver Art Museum (DAM) has an encyclopedic collection of over 70,000 artworks, spanning centuries and the entire globe, over 400 of which fall into the fairly broad category of “electronic media” (video and software-based installations, CD-ROMs, websites, video tapes, and more). Due to the exhibition and acquisition of electronic media art and time-based media art often out pacing the development of best practices for the preservation of such artworks, the Denver Art Museum, like many museums, has developed a “backlog” of untreated and minimally cataloged objects necessary for the realization of the museum's media artwork collection. To combat this backlog, the museum has adopted an iterative, project-based approach to identification and treatment of such objects. I had the pleasure of taking a leading role in the most recent project at the DAM, an IMLS grant-funded initiative aimed at migrating all of the media artwork in the collection to a digital repository, and updating all catalog records for each object, either physical or digital, associated with those works.
Read MoreI recently completed my residency at Louisiana Public Broadcasting, as part of my role as a National Digital Stewardship Resident (NDSR) in the American Archive of Public Broadcasting (AAPB) cohort. I'm excited to be moving on to a position in the conservation department at the Denver Art Museum, but I want to pause and indulge in some navel gazing regarding the whirlwind of a year I have had since graduating from NYU's Moving Image Archiving Program last May.
Read MoreMy grandfather, James Colloton, Sr. (1926-2014), or "Papa" to my cousins and me, recorded home movies of my dad and his siblings with his 8mm film camera. Christmas mornings, family vacations, sledding in the front yard, and water skiing every summer, all moments mechanically frozen in time and stowed away in a film canister.
Read MoreI recently completed my MA degree thesis project on the conceptual artist Buky Schwartz. Schwartz is perhaps best known for the video installations and single-channel video art that he created during the 1970s and 1980s. His estate's collection of photographs, video tapes, and other forms of documentation embody the artist's legacy as well as the key to preserving his artwork.
Read MorePaul Ryan was a pioneer of his field and can be considered one of the first video artists. The collection of Paul Ryan is now housed in an apartment on the Upper West Side of Manhattan where Ryan lived and worked for much of his career. The following Collection Assessment describes the significance, organization, and condition of the Ryan's analog video collection.
Read MoreIn the course of an 8 week period, the Denver Art Museum (DAM) was able to implement a complex digital preservation strategy quickly and efficiently. Artworks from the museum’s design collection were disk imaged, ingested into the museum’s digital repository, and described in the museum’s collection management system.
Read More“TechFocus iii: Caring for Software-based Art,” a symposium organized by the American Institute for Conservation’s Electronic Media Group, sought to address the difficult task of preserving works created in a constantly evolving medium. Hosted by the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, the symposium brought together leaders in the field of software-preservation from a variety of cultural institutions to share case studies, provide workshops, and to further develop a network of collection caretakers. The complexities of software-based artworks are immense, and a community of collection professionals (formed through events like these) is essential to providing future access and exhibition of such works.
Read MoreI had the good fortune to attend the New (+Old) Media: Restoration, Preservation, Archiving and Access Meeting and Symposium this summer, from June 25-27. Richard Lowenberg of the 1st-Mile Institute (http://www.1st-mile.org/) organized the meeting as part of the 2015 CURRENTS: Santa Fe International New Media Festival (http://currentsnewmedia.org/).
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