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blogs.cornell.edu | Article Link | by Oya Rieger & Mickey Casad

In February of 2013, Cornell University Library in collaboration with the Society for the Humanities began a two-year project funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) to preserve access to complex born-digital new media art objects. The project aims to develop a technical framework and associated tools to facilitate enduring access to interactive digital media art with a focus on artworks stored on hard drive, CD-ROM, and DVD-ROM. The ultimate goal is to create a preservation and access practice for complex digital assets that is based on a thorough and practical understanding of the characteristics of digital objects and requirements from the perspectives of collection curators and users alike. Digital content that is not used is prone to neglect and oversight. Reliable access mechanisms are essential to the ongoing usability of digital assets. However, no archival best practices yet exist for accessing and preserving complex born-digital materials. Given our emphasis on use and usability and our recognition that we must develop a framework that addresses the needs of future as well as current media art researchers, we developed a survey targeting researcher, artists, and curators to expand our understanding of user profiles and use cases. The purpose of this article is to summarize our key findings of the survey.

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