Preserving and Emulating Digital Art Objects

Abstract

The ultimate aim of the PAFDAO project was to create generalizable new media preservation and access practices that will be applicable for different media environments and institutional types. The nature of the project's test collection, a set of CD-ROM artworks from Cornell's Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art 1 , has meant that the project provides a case study in new media preservation that may be informative to library and museum contexts alike.Rose Kohn Goldsen (1917Goldsen ( -1985 was a professor of Sociology at Cornell University and an early critic of commercial mass media's impact on social and ethical imagination. Named in her honor, the Rose Goldsen Archive of New Media Art was founded in 2002 by Professor Timothy Murray (Director, Society for the Humanities, Cornell University) in the Cornell Library Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections as an international research collection for scholars of new media and media art history. 2 Since its founding, the Goldsen Archive has grown to achieve global recognition as a prominent research collection that documents more than 60 years of the history of aesthetic experimentation with electronic communications media. These collections span the two most crucial decades in the emergence of digital media art, from 1991 to the present, tracing the historical shift in emphasis within media culture from disc-based to networked and Web-based applications. They also mark the early stirrings of a networked, interactive digital culture that has subsequently become the global norm. The Goldsen Archive constitutes a vital record of our cultural and aesthetic history as a digital society.A wide range of audiences explore the Goldsen, which supports on-site access to all of its holdings in keeping with CUL's archival mission. The Goldsen Archive is cataloged and accessible via the library's online catalog and the WorldCat global catalog. The archive's website includes guides and collection descriptions to facilitate discovery of materials by potential users. The Division staff are actively involved in Cornell courses, including Goldsen materials. The Goldsen Archive is regularly visited by academic researchers, media and technology scholars, and artists. The Goldsen Archive has also conducted a number of public programming initiatives and there are plans for a 2016 exhibit at Cornell to highlight the collection.1 The Goldsen Archive's holdings range to include media formats such as reel-to-reel videotape, floppy disk, database artworks housed on external hard drives, and works of net.art. All of these formats pose unique and significant preservation challenges. For more information, see the Goldsen Archive website: http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/ 2 Murray, T.