Forging the Future: New Tools for Variable Media Preservation proposes a consortium of museums and cultural heritage organizations dedicated to exploring, developing, and sharing new vocabularies and tools for cultural preservation.
This consortium will build upon innovative research developed in previous years by its members as part of the Variable Media Network (VMN) and Archiving the Avant-Garde working groups. The focus of this foundation phase was research into innovative preservation standards and strategies. The focus of Forging the Future is building tools written to those standards that help organizations choose among those strategies.
Initially, vocabulary terms will be developed for use in the Media Art Notation System (MANS) that apply to, and are shared by, all three tools. This project will also define vocabulary creation methods as they apply to variable media artwork and MANS.
There are three practical and complementary tools that will be developed in this project: the Franklin Furnace Database (FFDB) is designed for cataloging variable media artworks and events contained in small to midsize collections of presenting arts organizations; the Digital Asset Management Database (DAMD) manages digital metadata that is directly relational to all the tools; the Variable Media Questionnaire (VMQ) contains data and metadata necessary to migrate, re-create, and preserve cataloged variable media objects.
These tools should be available for free to the public in early 2009--please check back then!
To learn more about Forging the Future in the meantime, please contact us at ude.eniam.timu@erutluc.loop