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Low-resource/No-resource: Lowering the Barriers to Sustainable Digital Preservation in the Contemporary Art Professions

Published onAug 29, 2024
Low-resource/No-resource: Lowering the Barriers to Sustainable Digital Preservation in the Contemporary Art Professions
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Abstract – Digital preservation knowledge and practice is necessary in all domains and professions but is often presumed to take place only within the context of the memory or research institution. If we are to improve digital preservation practice, knowledge, funding and awareness, we must broaden our understanding of the current state of digital preservation in self-funded and other low-resource contexts.

This paper presents a detailed case study of one such context, the state of digital preservation knowledge and practice within the UK professional artist population. Contrary to public belief, artists constitute a highly educated but severely underfunded profession. At the same time, artists in contemporary practice are largely dependent for their professional survival upon the competent and sustainable preservation and use of fragile and valuable digital objects. However, training and sociotechnical support infrastructure for this professional domain is conspicuous by its absence.

These tensions make contemporary professional art practice an ideal site for investigation of the barriers to - and benefits of - improved digital preservation practice.

This paper provides an overview of current digital preservation practice in this complex professional landscape; delivers practical recommendations for consideration by the digital preservation community; and demonstrates the value of interdisciplinary research in understanding the real barriers to digital preservation – and how we may lower them - in a fascinating and often misunderstood profession.

KeywordsDigital Preservation, Visual Art, Qualitative Research, Social Science, Advocacy.

This paper was submitted for the iPRES2024 conference on March 17, 2024 and reviewed by Dr. Özhan Saglik, Tricia Patterson, Karin Bredenberg and 1 anonymous reviewer. The paper was accepted with reviewer suggestions on May 6, 2024 by co-chairs Heather Moulaison-Sandy (University of Missouri), Jean-Yves Le Meur (CERN) and Julie M. Birkholz (Ghent University & KBR) on behalf of the iPRES2024 Program Committee.

Introduction

Some recent keynote speakers at iPRES have introduced welcome and important reflections on the need to widen our vision of the contexts in which we assume that digital preservation takes place. Specifically, we should think more carefully about the importance of digital preservation needs and challenges in low-resource environments such as community archives and self-funded efforts to preserve; in short, more work is needed to lower the barriers to sustainable digital preservation beyond the context of the large, funded memory or research institution.

This conversation is timely: iPRES and similar events partly exist to highlight the importance of digital preservation to all research domains and professions in contemporary life. To do this effectively, it is necessary to produce and share high-quality case studies of digital preservation practice that are - wherever possible - grounded in specific and diverse professions and domains.  This is particularly important where it can be demonstrated that effective work in a specified profession or domain depends upon “access to digital materials beyond the limits of media failure or technological and organisational change” [1].

Most UK digital preservation research and practice is currently deployed in the context of large memory and research institutions such as national libraries, archives, universities, research centres and large galleries, largely driven by legal and organisational requirements to ingest, preserve and provide access to their digital material.  In those contexts, the funder policy and legal regulation is binding, the use cases are clear, and the guidance frameworks, training offerings and standards are present.  

But what about people who work in a sector which is mostly self-employed - that is to say, beyond the reach of institutional expertise and support?  Particularly when these are people who operate on extremely tight or non-existent profit margins and so will require every activity and skill-set to deliver direct benefit to their work.  If such a professional sector was also demonstrably dependent on the digital objects that they receive, create, manage and deploy, then it is apparent that clearly understanding and effectively executing digital curation and preservation knowledge would be of potentially very high importance in this professional community. 

But what is the likelihood that these individuals are currently engaging with digital preservation skills and activities, as defined within the information science world?  How can we understand current digital preservation decisions, increase awareness of good practice, and lower the barriers to effective and sustainable digital preservation in these low-resource, unregulated contexts?

Contemporary visual artists, as a profession, offer an ideal case study to explore these questions. Artists constitute a highly qualified profession whose workflows increasingly involve the management and preservation of a variety of digital objects to provide evidence of their practice for the use of visual arts funders, dealers, exhibition organisers and those engaged in art historical and critical studies. 

Yet digital preservation in this context is not visible or well-understood. There is little evidence that this professional domain receives sufficient digital preservation training at either student or professional stages. Further, as self-employed workers in a spottily-regulated industry, earning unusually low incomes, contemporary artists lack access to expert assistance, supporting technical infrastructure, or the guidance of accessible standards and models of sustainable digital preservation practice.  

Why Digital Resources Matter To Artists

Contemporary visual art practice in the UK is, against serious odds, abundant. Recent estimates place the overall UK market (i.e. dealer sales and the secondary auction market combined) as the second-largest in the world with 2022 sales estimated at USD 11.9 billion [2].

The UK Government recently claimed that the creative industries are “a global British success story” [3]. However, the reality is that if this is the case, it is despite Government policy; funding for contemporary practice by UK artists continues to be under pressure, and most earn £10,000 p.a. or less [4], [5], which is considerably less than the £34,963 median gross full-time wage in the UK in 2023 (including all low-paid, unqualified full-time employment) [6].  Indeed, a recent enquiry discovered that artists contracted by publicly-funded galleries across England, Scotland and Northern Ireland received an overall median hourly rate of £2.60 per hour (and falling to £1.88 per hour when focused on the production of artworks and exhibition-making). This is in contrast with the current UK adult legal minimum wage of £9.50 per hour [7].

For these reasons, contemporary visual art practice can be understood as uniquely vulnerable to a variety of significant pressures.  Financial sustainability of an individual practice is likely to be tenuous at best.  There are pervasive myths around the profession of art-making that allow the wider public to overlook or dismiss the substantial labour, skills base and resources required for professional practice.  There is little evidence of a cohesive approach in the UK for the support of career planning, or for digital skills training, even at the student stage - where the art school “hidden curriculum” [8], [9], [10] is not usually strong on the delivery of key transferable information skills such as digital object care.  And when in practice, artists are usually fully occupied by intense competition for the limited types of social, symbolic, and economic capital available to them [11], [12] to enable professional survival.

In this challenging world, artists are regularly expected to find a way to make their work happen even when the necessary support is not available - as art labour theorist Howard Becker has written, support is considered to be an optional resource for art making: “If no one supports its doing, it will go unsupported” [13] - an approach which appears to suggest that we can be confident that the work will still happen. Examination of the financial state of a lot of individual art practices undercuts this confidence: it is likely that for many people the work will not happen.  This series of challenges suggests, then, that in order to sustain practice, artists must maximise the benefit of all resources at their disposal.  And, increasingly, the resources being used in art-making - in line with almost every other profession - are highly likely to be at least partly digital. 

The production, use and preservation of digital objects such as artists’ statements, funding bid documents, and photography of completed work, inter alia, are regularly required to progress an art career.  These are the digital objects upon which funders, curators, dealers, critics, and buyers often rely in order to make economic decisions which directly have a critical impact upon the artist - for example, whether or not to include an artist in a show, to fund new work, to provide public criticism, or to buy a completed piece.  This situation highlights the increased importance of digital preservation skills and awareness for artists - the ability to create and retrieve authentic digital objects now plays a creatively and economically powerful role in contemporary practice.

Meanwhile, digital preservation and curation principles, models and standards employed across business, the sciences and humanities - particularly those efforts aimed at management of digital cultural heritage collections - potentially offer much to improve digital object management and preservation in contemporary visual arts practice.  However, most current policy and strategy is focused on the institutional context. 

How, then, do we communicate the value of solid digital preservation and curation practice to individual contemporary visual artists, and those who fund and train them?  And how can we, as the digital preservation community, improve our communications with professions and research domains that are not yet participating in the digital preservation conversation?  How can we render our models and standards more intelligible and relevant to those working beyond an institutional context?  In other words, what can artists learn from the digital curation and digital preservation community?  And what can the digital preservation domain learn from artists? In short, how do we lower the barriers here to sustainable digital preservation?

The current paper describes a UK-focused study aiming to answer these questions.  The project is concerned with how UK-based visual artists seek, create, preserve, and disseminate digital objects in their working practices and to what extent these artists manage their digital objects in a sustainable way.  An important strand of this inquiry is the current state of digital preservation awareness and practice amongst professional artists in the UK.

Methods

The study was carried out using individual interviews within a naturalistic methodology [14], [15] which, in practical terms, translates to talking with the artist in the setting, and using the terminology, of their choice. Artists were randomly selected for invitation to participate from the membership database of DACS [16], from across different levels of payment received through Payback, the flagship copyright royalties scheme for UK professional visual artists [17]. Forty semi-structured case-study interviews were carried out, of which thirty-seven were usable. Most interviews took between 1.5 and 3 hours, with the longest one taking 5.5 hours.  In total, around 140 hours of audio data were gathered.

It is worth noting that the medium used by the artist was not a consideration for selection; the study was not specifically interested in artists working in digital media (as is often assumed) but rather in all practices including traditional and manual forms of art making.

The interview instrument was designed to break down the main themes of the inquiry into a series of specific, answerable questions framed in language suitable for the artist participant.  This is one of the ways where my own experience as an artist, and as a PhD student at an art school, gave me useful insight into the terminology and verbal framing that was likely to be relevant to another artist, including those who do not necessarily have an existing interest or expertise in information science, science and technology studies, digital preservation, or archival theory.

For example, when asking about the existence and nature of a digital preservation strategy for each artist, the questionnaire does not use those terms. First, the questionnaire poses questions about the existence, extent and nature of digital objects (sometimes referred to as ‘files’ or ‘digital stuff’, depending on the term used by the participant) created and received by the artist, and then asks where these are stored, with unscripted follow-up questions used to find out the technical solution, whose choice that was and how confident the artist is about the efficacy of their arrangements.  Subsequent questions cover the value attributed by the artist to these objects.  

Putting together the answers to these questions, then, provides insight into the extent to which an artist has a digital preservation strategy, in a way that that goes deeper than a response to the direct question, ‘What is your digital preservation strategy?’; provides a more valid response because the answers to the various individual questions must validate each other in order for the artist’s account to make sense; and helps support the understanding of any participant who is not already familiar with the meaning of concepts such as ‘digital preservation’. In this way, the interview instrument provides the framework for a substantial interview which both informs the questioner and the participant. 

Questions covered the participant’s medium, education; age group; gender identity; art experience; main source of income; all regular art work tasks; tasks that use digital tools; online search and retrieval behaviours; level of confidence in specified digital skills including digital preservation; interest in digital skills training; volume, age and types of stewarded files; file storage and backup choices; and value and use of stewarded files.

Within this range of topics, we find self-assessment of competence and knowledge of digital preservation tasks. Many – but not all - artists asked questions about what was involved in digital object management before they were comfortable assessing their own level of knowledge.  This was an opportunity for advocacy and knowledge sharing: we talked about the key skills involved, including selection and appraisal of items to retain, provenance of digital items, description and file format selection, choosing a storage environment, preservation options, understanding the legal aspects of use and reuse, and the extent to which these issues mattered in the artist’s individual context. 

The definitions of ‘good practice’ in digital object management are mainly provided by the Digital Curation Lifecycle Model [18] which is widely used as a definition of digital curation in the UK; and digital preservation concepts as defined by the Digital Preservation Handbook [19].  Digital curation was expressed in this approach as a whole-lifecycle view of digital object handling, including the skills involved in seeking, receiving, and creating digital objects, and including the processes of selecting which digital objects to keep, before addressing the management of the resulting collection in a preservation environment, which is in turn consistently defined by the Digital Preservation Handbook. 

In this way, digital preservation and digital curation were presented as practical, comprehensible digital object care tasks.  In addition, the term ‘digital curation’ required careful disambiguation from the notion of (art) curation, a widely-used concept amongst this participant group.

Digital object management is often assumed to be simply about storage.  Here, the concept is clearly expanded to include the entire lifecycle of the object from when it enters the workflow onwards, including - but not limited to - storage-related decisions and activities. The clear and accessible language of the Digital Preservation Handbook helped assure newcomers to the topic that the concepts were accessible, and definitions could be freely accessed online. 

Findings

In this section, I will set out those study findings most relevant to the digital preservation sphere.

High value of digital information and digital objects

The study found that most respondents perform digital information retrieval tasks multiple times per day. Tasks in this category were as follows:

  1. Research practices:

    1. research by drawing

    2. research with participants

    3. desk research.

  2. Communication and collaboration activities:

    1. communications with artistic collaborators;

    2. communications with technical collaborators, makers, installers, suppliers;

    3. communication with audiences:

      1. promotional work;

      2. community participation.

Almost all these tasks (excepting desk research) were reported to either create digital objects that had to subsequently be labelled and stored; or be dependent upon the retrieval of digital objects that had previously been stored.

In most cases, artists performed these information tasks on a daily basis, and the majority more than once per workday. Artists reported that these information tasks are of foundational importance within art labour beyond the artist’s defined practice as well as within the practice, and within individual projects [20].

All participants reported that they routinely searched for, retrieved and created digital objects as part of their working practices, resulting in a collection of digital objects that must be managed in some way over time if they are to remain available for use and reference. 

The file types managed by study participants were varied. Those reported were as follows:

  • Image: TIFF, JPG, CR2, GIF, PNG, EPS, EPX, DWG, DXF, AI.

  • Textual: DOC, DOCX, TXT, PAGES, RTF, RTFD, EML, text messages.

  • Video: MOV, MP4, AVI, FCP, FCPX.

  • Audio: MP3, WAV, AAC, AIFF, AC3 .

  • Presentations: PPT, KEY.

  • Spreadsheets: XLS, NUMBERS.

  • Image/text: PDF, PDF/A.

Artists report that the digital objects being sought, created, used, and stored have high value to the artist. There were six main reasons that digital objects were highly valued by participants, regardless of whether these are digital objects which have been created by the artist, shared by another, or retrieved from the Internet.  These six main reasons are, in order of popularity: 

  1. for research purposes

  2. as evidence for funders, potential funders or exhibitors

  3. for promotional purposes

  4. as source material

  5. for personal reflection

  6. for commercial sale or licensing.

Reasons 1, 2, 3, and 6 are clearly related to economic as well as creative value, whereas 4, ‘As source material’, is as part of the creative making workflow. Number 5, ‘For personal reflection’, was also a strong theme in the value of digital objects to artists.  Personal reflection happens before and after projects, as artists reflect on their creative trajectory and find ways forward with their work.

In this way we can see the variety of digital objects valued by artists and the mixture of contexts – economic, creative, and personal – in which digital objects are prized by this participant group.

Low overall levels of knowledge of digital object care

The artists interviewed for this study clearly assigned great importance to their digital objects. However, there was overall a low level of knowledge of digital object care, including digital preservation, in this participant group. These digital objects are fragile and highly susceptible to neglect, particularly as most artists’ digital objects are not routinely deposited in a managed archive.

There was no specific, formal test of digital preservation knowledge during the interview. Rather, I noted whether participants’ regular work tasks included digital preservation activities; and observed the level of familiarity displayed by participants in their discussion of the importance and practice of digital preservation and related activities.

Artists self-assessed their level of knowledge about various digital object management tasks using a five-point Likert item, ranging from ‘absolutely not knowledgeable’ through ‘not really knowledgeable’, ‘not sure’ and ‘fairly knowledgeable’ to ‘definitely knowledgeable’.  There is insufficient space here to set out the findings in detail, but in summary the self-assessment often diverged from my impression of their digital preservation knowledge level, usually on the basis of two common themes: a) the meaning of ‘back-up’, and b) the level of confidence in portable storage media.

To most artists, the idea of digital object management usually equated to having a file hierarchy with which they were familiar (or another way of knowing where their files were) across their data-holding digital tools; putting things on external plug-in hard drives; and creating back-ups.  Many artists use Mac laptops in their daily work, and many of those artists use the Time Machine back-up application but expressed concern that they did not know how it worked, if they were using it properly, or how they would retrieve a specific file from the back-ups created.  Despite most artists claiming to back-up their data regularly, there was very little awareness of the digital preservation obligations created by the making of back-ups: the general consensus was that having created a back-up, the job of preservation was complete (rather than just begun).  

The use of external plug-in hard drives is widespread in this population, with these appliances widely viewed as reliable solutions for all storage and back-up requirements.  This is not surprising given the relatively affordable and portable nature of external hard drives and the lack of existing sector-wide solutions for digital curation and preservation. There was limited indication of awareness of the risks of using these drives, and there was in some cases evidence of creating multiple copies of the same object on different drives to guard against media failure. 

Two artists discussed the obsolescence of carrier media such as magnetic tape, floppy disks, and videotape.  But in most other participants, there was little awareness of the risks presented by physical loss or obsolescence of plug-in external hard drives despite their almost ubiquitous use.  In addition, several artists reported use of plug-in USB sticks as a preservation strategy, despite the multiple problems with reliance upon these as a long-term preservation solution: they have all the risks of physical obsolescence and damage as other external drives, but are also much more likely to be lost due to their small size.  They are also often built to a lower quality than external plug-in hard drives as they are widely manufactured and distributed as promotional items rather than as a storage option that has been tested for a certain level of durability.  But of course, the bigger problem here is the difference between the concept of storage and that of preservation, a disambiguation that realistically will only be clarified through participation in high quality training. 

The precariousness of this situation is not always fully realised by artists at this point in time, given the extent to which the term ‘archive’ is widely used by participants when talking about a storage platform or storage device such as a plug-in external hard drive, or the use of such a platform or device (when ‘archive’ is used as a verb), rather than an archive in the sense of a planned, managed, sustainable archival environment for sustained preservation of objects, or the use of such an environment.

This is no mere battle of epistemologies: in this slippage of use, we can see that commercial storage platforms and sub-£100 external hard drives are being endowed with the ability to keep valued digital objects preserved – that is to say safe, complete, findable, accessible and reusable over a long period of time such as multiple decades.  Meanwhile, the factors realistically required to achieve these goals remain invisible to the user audience most in need. This is due to the absence of training, resourcing and policy. 

There was very little evidence that any sort of training in digital preservation processes had been provided to any of the participating artists, despite the range of ages, educational backgrounds, artforms and schooling locations. Training had been received by only two of the participating artists and this was, in both cases, provided by preparation for an employed role in an art-related post. 

Further, artists were often surprised by or initially resistant to the idea that this is a discrete skill set that can be taught, learned, or improved; in other words, information work remains “invisible labour” [21] in this sector.  Accordingly, most respondents who acknowledged low skill or knowledge levels relating to a given information task attributed it to some sort of personal failing rather than a resolvable skills gap.

There is no evidence from participant narratives in this study of information literacy or digital object care being formally, routinely taught in tertiary-level art school curricula.  Artists’ information needs have also been neglected by information professionals [22], [23].  So where do artists and others go for help with the skills required for the management and care of digital objects?

Information literacy training, as taught in library and information sciences [24] and, at a more introductory level in university library inductions, can benefit from wider understanding of the applicability of these skills to artists.  A sprinkling of workshops and events have started to engage with the ideas of how to best operate as an artist in the emerging digital economy, some of which include strategic and considered use of the Internet for, e.g., promotional tasks and the creation of high quality digital objects, but the solution to many of the skills gaps identified in the current study is the widespread adoption of structured and sustained pedagogical frameworks which include advocacy for and teaching of digital curation and preservation, and information literacy. 

Lack of continuing professional development or structured guidance outwith formal education

Artists reported that the primary influences on their decision-making around digital preservation and other digital object care tasks were friends, professional peers, partners and family members. There was no sign of funder policy or other structured guidance in the list of influences on artists when making decisions in this area.

There is no UK-wide service to advise specifically on these skills; arts advocacy organisations such as DACS, Artquest and artists’ unions and associations such as the Association of Illustrators step in to help with parts of the picture, e.g. by providing advice on rights issues and other legal issues, and supporting their artist members with advice and training on some of the issues related to digital information handling, but these services are necessarily provided in response to artist-initiated enquiries on a case-by-case basis.

In addition to the improvement of formal training in the art school, there is also room for the national funding schemes such as those enacted by the UK arts councils to think more strategically about how they can support artists’ skills development.  Arts Council England (ACE) has funded a team of ‘Tech Champions’ with a remit of supporting digital skills for those benefiting from ACE funding, but expertise offered is focused on use of social media and data-driven promotional activities [25]. At the time of writing, none of the four UK nations’ arts councils report offering support with digital object care or information retrieval skills development. 

Lack of dedicated, affordable preservation infrastructure

Self-funding by artists of their projects is commonplace and is a major factor in the systematic economic challenges to contemporary art making.  If supporting infrastructure such as archiving services infrastructure is to be put in place for the outputs of such projects, it will only currently happen on a self-funded basis.  This is a fundamental challenge to changing practice within this type of project and is possibly the area that is most dependent on individual artists understanding the need for high quality digital object care and marshalling the resources to bring this about.  This only has a chance of happening if artists connect the urgency of digital object management tasks with the value that they personally place on their digital objects, and understand the risks faced by these fragile resources. This does not yet appear to be happening.

The lack of specific resourcing for digital infrastructure (and policy) - including specifically for digital preservation - also occurs when the artist is working on a publicly-funded project, as the major UK public funders such as the arts councils do not currently provide these tools for well-managed digital objects.  There is also a complex landscape of private or institution-based commissioning, some of which may offer individual digital object management infrastructure but there is no evidence of a cohesive UK-wide or even nation-level approach to the provision of this infrastructure, or policy development to make it available and affordable and to stimulate its use and stability for long-term preservation. There is not currently any sign of UK public funders expecting a dedicated budget line - or dedicating a stated percentage of funding - for preservation, as is increasingly the case in the publicly-funded science sector [26].

This situation is a major driver of the enthusiastic uptake by artists of free-to-use and low-cost digital tools and services which allow the artist to research, retrieve, create, repurpose, and communicate their work when there is little to no budget available.  Most participants reported regular use of Google Drive or Dropbox for both ‘preserving’ (in participant terminology) and sharing digital objects.

The use of these platforms and services, however, can bring risks; many online services and platforms that allow users to upload, store and share digital objects also bring with them possibilities of digital privacy or digital information security breaches, harvesting and re-selling of personal data, and thus a problematic approach to intellectual property - a situation only likely to become more problematic with the rise of generative AI. 

Commonly-used platforms now publish ‘terms and conditions’ or ‘terms of use’ documents outlining the contract into which new users are entering by use of the service, which may or may not expose users to the risks listed above.  A quick review of these terms of use documents of the most popular content platforms reported by the participant group show that they are documents of between 2,442 and 9,642 words, often rich in legal terminology.  Although it is notable that some services have made a specific effort, especially since EU and UK investigations into digital platforms and their approach to consumers in the mid-to-late 2010s [27], [28] to both simplify these contract documents and to bring them to the attention of users, participants in the current study demonstrated very limited awareness of these issues, which is in line with the low levels of information literacy reported by this population despite their high levels of education and demonstrable intelligence across a wide range of other competences. 

Choices of storage platform were very rarely reflected upon consciously by artist participants; platforms were selected largely due to the choices already made by peers and / or specified by funders or commissioning organisations.  The possibility of making an active choice for oneself was not usually entertained.

For many artists, these problems may be a lesser concern than the ability to store, find, send and receive digital objects quickly and affordably. This leaves artists particularly vulnerable to substantive problems if entrusting highly valued, fragile, and in many cases irreplaceable digital artwork and documentation to such systems which do not offer any guarantee of long-term digital preservation.

Another factor may be the particularly low level of resource (time, money, space) and high level of precarity on which artists operate.  Sometimes the only option is to use whatever solution may meet immediate need.  If it is quick and cheap or free now, there is no policy telling us to act otherwise, and we have practically no margin within which to live, we are likely to postpone any concerns about ethics of the platform’s business model, or data security, or guarantees of longevity, to a hypothetical future moment.  

Relevant information science concepts that are potentially helpful are not currently visible or meaningful to artists.

There is a range of time-tested and widely-used models and standards for those working in the preservation of digital objects within cultural heritage preservation institutions.  There are a few additional resources for the use of the independent, highly engaged non-archivist [29], [30] but very little sign of guidance and advocacy for the non-specialist population.  In short, the richness of digital preservation models and standards, and their potential value and relevance to the art sector are not currently visible to this profession.  Further, the necessary use of specific technical vocabulary renders these models and standards incomprehensible to the non-specialist.  

Certainly, it is clear from the study interviews that translation of key introductory digital preservation concepts such as ‘archive’, ‘back-up’, and ‘preserve’ is necessary.  However, this is not because non-specialists have never heard of these terms.  Rather – and possibly more dangerously – it is because the non-specialist uses these terms already, but in a different, less specified way.  Sometimes the non-technical use of these terms is done with confidence.  However, when the artist is then asked in more detail about their understanding of the activities and skills denoted by each term, confidence can crumble, as per this participant:

“I’ve never thought of that.  I feel that I know how to do it, but I might be doing it wrong.  Maybe.” [Artist 14, in a discussion about the concept of backing-up.]

The important point here is not a simple ontological argument about definitions. What matters is whether those who are responsible for the ongoing survival of digital assets have sufficient understanding of digital preservation to ensure successful long-term stewardship of their valued digital objects.

Recommendations

This research resulted in a substantial recommendation set which is openly available for feedback [31]. The complete recommendation set is aimed at:

  • art funders;

  • art schools;

  • government;

  • art advocacy organisations;

  • artists;

  • information science and research data advocacy organisations.

In the published recommendation set, I offer three recommendations to this last category, as follows:

  1. Remember that not everyone who might benefit from your work / research findings / training materials / advocacy resources is based in the sciences. Further, some potential users (including lone researchers, citizen scientists, sole traders and artists) are not working in the institutional context but could still find information sciences and digital information skills very useful. Truly useful principles can be applicable in new contexts: consider your language and terminology in order to be as broadly applicable as possible and, ideally, get feedback on your final text from a mixture of users from different domains before publication.

  2. Devote some resources specifically to the production of non-specialist language versions of deliverables including research reports, training materials and policy advice, so that these resources are accessible to and usable by those who are not from an information sciences, library and archives, or computing background. This could be in the form of a non-specialist language summary, the inclusion of a glossary at the beginning of the deliverable, or by creating versions of the entire deliverable written for different user groups. Collaboration with artists and those who advocate for artists is likely to help with finding terminology and examples meaningful to artists.

  3. Expand sustainability efforts to support long-term access to digital preservation, digital curation, research data management and information literacy guidance, advice, training materials and research reports online. Too many projects and programmes of activity disappear from online access a year or two after funding ends. The key deliverables at least should be deposited in a digital object repository such as an institutional research repository with public open access to its holdings, or another long-term stable storage environment that provides a stable online identifier such as a DOI or URI [31].

On the basis of further reflection in the preparation of this paper, I offer these additional recommendations as indications of where collaboration may be most effective specifically in improving digital preservation practice in the artist population.

Collaborate with educational institutions to help incorporate/expand training in the professional curriculum.

Most artists regularly use digital tools to create, store and work with highly-valued digital objects. However, familiarity does not always create expertise. This means that training is a) urgently required to be part of the art school curriculum; and b) should derive basic principles from existing digital preservation and digital curation scholarship to present a model of the foundational knowledge and applicable skills for good practice in digital object care. 

Art schools could help achieve this by starting development of a curriculum framework for teaching the digital skills now needed by artists, including detailed digital object preservation and curation, and allied competencies such as information literacy skills. 

Such training interventions are likely to challenge long-standing assumptions made by artists about what is necessary for high-quality methods of retrieval and preservation of digital material, and so those providing this training must have solid expertise with the principles of information literacy, and digital curation and preservation to justify these ‘new’ practices.  This is a tall order, but the lack of training in these skills in the artist ecosystem appears to be a significant one, with wide-reaching impact.  Digital preservation expertise is needed to bring about these improvements in artist education.

Collaborate with art organisations to support development of professional training.

Digital preservation expertise is also desperately needed for artists’ continuing professional development. Due to the lack of public funding in the arts, this is a particularly difficult area in which to progress, even when there is expertise, community engagement and organisational will.

A prominent recent example of this is the DACS-related Art360 Foundation which launched in 2016.  The Art360 project offered programmes of intense, supported legacy-planning activity in which artists could bid to take part, with 54 artists having participated by the time of writing [32].  A downloadable app followed in 2018 to help support UK-based artists and artists’ estates who wish to undertake an auditing and documentation process on their own holdings of artworks and art work-related materials.  The app provides accessible checklists and suggested activities to help artists audit and describe what they have. There were no specific activities or guides offered to users on how to perform back-up or digital preservation tasks, but the app did raise the important and useful issues of audit and documentation and broke down these activities in an approachable way, which is invaluable for these early stages of the journey towards preservation. 

However, Art360 closed in December 2023, “a direct consequence of ongoing financial challenges in an increasingly demanding fundraising environment” [32], another victim of the challenges of attempting to build sociotechnical infrastructure for preservation on project funding – a task difficult enough in the sciences, never mind the chronically underfunded arts sector.

Even when looking internationally, there is limited provision of accessible material for artists on how to do digital preservation and, importantly, what constitutes good quality practice in the art context.  The US-based Artists’ Studio Archives project probably comes closest to those aims, at least in the English-language resources I have been able to find, and directly tackles digital preservation both in the downloadable workbook [33] and in workshop handouts, all openly available online.  The active phase of the project appears to be complete; I note that key resources have since been moved from the project website to a university server - hopefully this bodes well for their preservation. 

Another important initiative from the USA, the Joan Mitchell Foundation, provides a Digital Media Guidelines and Resources guide that includes useful information on digital asset management, digital preservation, file naming, metadata, cataloguing and platform and infrastructure selection, as part of their Creating A Living Legacy program (2007-2016) suite of resources [34]

These initiatives, whilst critically important to working artists given the dearth of resources, are often charitable, nearly always run on precarious budgets and dependent on funding appeals, and are sometimes funded only for a specific, time-limited project.  There is a need for a more stable, systematic approach to meet the needs of art work now, so that these training interventions can be reliably made.  Digital preservation advocacy efforts might consider the art sector as a fruitful ground for expansion.

Conclusion

In exposing each domain (i.e., contemporary art practice, and the information sciences) to the epistemology and practices of the other, this research aims to enhance understanding by artists of the relevance of the information sciences to their work and, conversely, allows information science practitioners, policymakers and researchers to accurately understand the actual information needs of contemporary visual artists.  The identification of this gap in dialogue, and the case for the value of bridging it, is one of the key outcomes of this research.

I propose that if we can make digital preservation initiatives intelligible to the contemporary art professions, we achieve two useful steps forward: 

  1. We aid those who are creating and exhibiting visual art to develop skills in effective search, retrieval, management, use and preservation of the digital objects necessary to sustain their practice; 

  2. We learn ways to improve the communication of the central principles of digital preservation and curation to audiences who do not share the technical vocabularies of the information science domain – and in so doing, we better understand how to make our reference resources clearer and more intelligible to the non-specialist user perspective. 

The findings presented here are not just applicable to the artist; improving the preservation of digital objects arising from art practice also has a positive potential impact on the work of art gallerists, dealers and advisors; curators and critics; and the art history and art theory research domains.

Improvements in practice that are explored here are also of potential value to other low-resource and no-resource (i.e., self-funded) contexts such as community archives, local history societies and charities. By lowering the boundaries to digital preservation for those currently working without budget, guidance and sociotechnical support infrastructure, we improve the complexity and completeness of the cultural heritage record for generations to come.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I am grateful to the Oxford Internet Institute and the Ruskin School of Art, both at the University of Oxford; the UK-based artists’ advocacy organisation DACS; and the UK Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) who supported this study.

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