Preserving Interactive Multimedia Art: A Case Study in Preservation Planning

Abstract

Abstract. Over the last years, digital preservation has become a particularly active research area. While several initiatives are dealing with the preservation of standard document formats, the challenges of preserving multimedia objects and pieces of electronic art are still to be tackled. This paper presents the findings of a pilot project for preserving born-digital interactive multimedia art. We describe the specific challenges the collection poses to digital preservation and the results of a case study identifying requirements on the preservation of interactive artworks.

Preservación de documentos en formatos nativos: obras de arte digital realizadas con Adobe Illustrator

“…En el caso real del Centro Ars Electronica, en Linz, Austria, presentado por Becker et al (2007), se explica que, para el año de la publicación de su artículo, esta institución llevaba 25 años coleccionando más de 30 000 trabajos de arte digital, con un aumento anual de 3 000 piezas anuales. Además, muchos se encontraban almacenados en CDs, con variados formatos, lo cual generaba problemas extremos en cuanto a la preservación digital, por sus caracterís-ticas específicas y complejas.…”

Distributed Preservation Services: Integrating Planning and Actions

“…The workflow as described in [14] consists of three phases: (1) Define requirements, (2) Evaluate potential preservation actions, and (3) Analyse results to arrive at a recommendation for a preservation action. Case studies validating the methodology have been described in [1,14]. The insights gained during these and other case studies have led to a recent refinement and extension of the process with a fourth phase in which an executable preservation plan is created, based on the well-documented recommendation that comes from the evaluation procedure.…”

“…Then the requirements are defined in a tree structure called objective tree, starting with high-level requirements such as object characteristics or process-related criteria and breaking them down to measurable requirements such as the fixity of image width or the time needed to transform a single object to a new representation. Examples of objective trees are presented in [1,14]. As the trees are often created in workshop settings where mind-mapping can be very helpful, the software can directly import trees created in mind-mapping software 4 .…”

Plato: A Preservation Planning Tool Integrating Preservation Action Services

“…As the definition of requirements in a tree structure is often done in a workshop setting, Plato also supports tree import from mind-mapping software 5 . The applicability and usefulness of the tool has been validated in a series of workshops and case studies which involved a wide range of institutions [1,3].…”