Digital curation skills in the performing arts – an investigation of practitioner awareness and knowledge of digital object management and preservation

Abstract

This study examines the digital curation awareness and practice of a sample of practitioners from the UK performing arts community. Twelve performance arts practitioners from across the UK were interviewed to establish understanding of whether, why and how they create and manage digital objects in the course of their creative work. Detailed qualitative data from this series of one-to-one interviews about the actual and intended digital curation practices of these performance arts practitioners establishes what they understand about sustainable management of digital objects, and also which digital curation activities they actually include in their working processes.This knowledge is supplemented with some preliminary exploration of the types of digital resources that are sought and used by performance arts practitioners, in order to understand whether there is a comparable appetite for the creation and for the reuse of digital objects in this field. Questions in the interview identify the sources used by practitioners when attempting to access digital objects created by others as part of research for their own creative work. This provides a 'practitioner's-eye view' of performance collections, that is to say the resources they use as collections for research, irrespective of the formal designation or intended purpose of such resources.Here, this enquiry is set into the broader context of digital curation and preservation. The approach to the interviewing is described, findings are discussed and the presence of possible skills and knowledge gaps is presented. Concluding remarks indicate the implications of these indicative findings for the representation of performance arts practice for current and future generations, and suggest useful future areas of enquiry. Bio Laura Molloy is a Preservation Researcher at the Humanities Advanced Technology andInformation Institute (HATII) at the University of Glasgow. Following an MA (Hons) Scottish Language and Literature at University of Glasgow, she returned to the University in March 2007 to join the Arts and Humanities Data Service ('AHDS') Performing Arts team. She has since worked on a number of European and UK-based digital preservation and curation projects and is specifically interested in articulating digital curation to all disciplines of research and practice, including those beyond the sciences.Her researcher profile is at http://glasgow.academia.edu/LauraMolloy/.2 A significant proportion of performing arts practitioners produce work outside institutional support structures such as those offered by academia or other large institution such as a national or regional theatre. The wide availability of affordable digital recording devices has allowed such practitioners to become active in the creation of digital objects in the course of researching, rehearsing and creating their work, and also in documenting rehearsals and staged presentations. Digital curation encompasses the processes and skills required for the sustainable management of digital assets thro...

Theater as Data

“…People will need to design and enforce action plans to preserve digital data and infrastructure. Molloy (2014) suggests that theater makers are insufficiently familiar with the needs of digital data preservation and don't usually have a preservation plan in place. Initiatives such as the Long Now Foundation are trying to develop best practices (Bollacker 2010).…”

Co-construction of meaning, creative processes and digital curation

“…Digital curation is a relevant domain of research in the context of artistic production (see Molloy, 2014). Tibbo and Duff (2008) state that "digital curation is essential not only for the sciences, but also for preservation of cultural heritage materials as well" ( p. 2).…”

“…As Rinehart and Ippolito (2014) put it in the context of new media arts, "the preservation of new media may inform the problem of preservation in other fields, from government records to the music industry to video games, and will, in turn, be informed by those related efforts" (p. 20). From this perspective, some research has already been developed in multiple contexts: performing arts (Molloy, 2014); digital arts (Innocenti, 2012); and contemporary music (Boutard, Guastavino, & Turner, 2013).…”

Documenting acousmatic music interpretation

“…In this context -and similarly to statements in performing and new media arts (e.g. Molloy, 2014, Post, 2017) -documentation for long-term preservation is critical. We thus build on Sant's (2017) advocacy of "[…] a shift from using performance documentation as a generic (and frequently contentious) term to thinking about documenting performance as the simple process of creating and organizing documents towards providing documentation that is available for long-term access" (p. 1).…”