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Digital Archiving for Artists

Basic Practices to Care for

Your Creative Output

Siobhan C. Hagan

Project Manager of the Memory Lab Network

DC Public Library

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Main resources

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Why care about preservation?

Cultural record
Legacy
Revenue

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Be your own art conservator

Watch: Nam Jun Paik’s “Untitled.”
Ask: what must you do for a stranger to understand and recreate your work in the future?

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Starting Out...

Be realistic
Low hanging fruit
Avoid paralyzation

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1. Inventory & Appraise

2. Organize & Store

3. Document & Describe

4. Access & Re-use

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Before

Inventory & Appraise

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After

Inventory & Appraise

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Automate

Apple Store (free)

Duplicate File Finder Remover
Duplicates Cleaner

Windows 10

CCleaner (Non-pro version is free)

Inventory & Appraise

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Automate

Apple Store (free)

Duplicate File Finder Remover

Inventory & Appraise

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Take inventory of your files

bit.ly/digitalfileinventory

Inventory & Appraise

Before you decide how to preserve your digital materials, you must know what you have and where you have it. Knowing what kind of files you have and where they are currently stored will help you to determine what kinds of actions you will need to take to preserve them.

Initially I had this as “STEP 1” but honestly personal archiving just can’t quite be broken down in linear steps as you will see. Taking inventory of your files is a great first step and definitely something to do before you do other steps, but you will be going back and inventorying or cleaning up or adding to your inventory again.

To get started, use this inventory template* as the minimum amount of fields of information you need to have. Feel free to add from there. For example, you may add 'Project Title' or “Places exhibited” or “Commissioned by” or “Funding from” or other fields to help you get a better sense of the kind of content you have stored. It may feel overwhelming to inventory all your digital files so start with one location or storage media (for example, your computer's hard drive). Once you get the hang of taking inventory on your computer, move on to the most daunting storage media you own.... like that external hard drive from six years ago.

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Automate

FileListCreator

Inventory & Appraise

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Automate

My inventory

Inventory & Appraise

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Appraisal and Selection

Decide what you want to save

Inventory & Appraise

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Appraisal and Selection

Developing your Selection Criteria

Important value to you
Format

Inventory & Appraise

Like many aspects of Personal Digital Archiving, selection will ultimately be up to you and what you value as "archival". However, there are two main criterion you can use when selecting files for long-term preservation: importance and format.

Prioritize files based on importance: You should start by saving and implementing preservation strategies on files that have sentimental, professional, financial, or academic value.
Prioritize based on format: If you have several copies in varying formats, select the uncompressed or lossless compression copy with the highest resolution (i.e. delete JPEGs but keep TIFFs).

Write everything you decide down, maybe as a a checklist, and apply it to your archive using your inventory (you will probably have to open some things up to figure out what they were.) This is your selection criteria. And maybe put it in a notes field in your inventory for example a “Priority” field with High, Medium, Low designation you give it based on these two factors.

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Appraisal and Selection

Developing a Retention Schedule

Example

Inventory & Appraise

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Choose a File Format

Quality matters
Open source or widely adopted
Convert if necessary

Inventory & Appraise

Save in the highest resolution you can afford, save them as open source which means the code is freely available and not stuck in a proprietary system that would be expensive or impossible to get access to if a company goes under. If you can’t have open source, go for the most widely adopted which really means popular or standardized. That means they will be around for awhile and therefore support will be around for awhile. check in to make sure these type of formats are still accessible regularly, and convert them to the newest “it” format. quality matters- be aware of what your settings are and what your needs are to reproduce your work or two create new works from your archive. Usually the highest quality is the best to keep for preservation, but if you work with video and/or have limited resources, this can get very expensive and very time consuming very quickly.

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Choose a File Format

Evaluate your needs and make a decision

Tips at DCPL Memory Lab (under “Formats”
Tips from MICA (according to medium)

Inventory & Appraise

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1. Inventory & Appraise

2. Organize & Store

3. Document & Describe

4. Access & Re-use

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Organize your files

File and folder naming

Organize & Store

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Spaces will corrupt.tif

Organize & Store

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Use-dashes-or_underscores.tif

or

CamelCase.tif

Organize & Store

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no!@#$%^&*()=+.tif

Organize & Store

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definitely.no.periods..tif

Organize & Store

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numbers_letters_Underscores-Dashes-CamelCase.tif

Organize & Store

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No-more-than-026-characters.mov

Organize & Store

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2019-01-23-file-name.mov

01-23-2019-file-name.mov

2019-file-name.mov

Organize & Store

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Dcpl_mlk_exterior_01.eps

Dcpl_mlk_exterior_02.eps

Dcpl_mlk_exterior_03.eps

Dcpl_mlk_exterior_04.eps

Organize & Store

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Dcpl_mlk_exterior_01.eps

Dcpl_mlk_exterior_02.eps

Dcpl_mlk_exterior_100.eps

Organize & Store

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Dcpl_mlk_exterior_001.eps

Dcpl_mlk_exterior_002.eps

Dcpl_mlk_exterior_100.eps

Organize & Store

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WorkName_version01.eps

WorkName_version02.eps

WorkName_version03.eps

WorkName_rev2019-01-17

WorkName_rev2020-03-18

Organize & Store

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Organize & Store

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Resources

Filenaming cheat sheet
DCPL Memory Lab LibGuide

Organize & Store

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Automate

Batch renaming guide (Adobe Bridge)

Organize & Store

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Store Your Files

3-2-1 Rule
Evaluate Cloud Services
External hard drives
RAIDS

Organize & Store

THE 3-2-1 RULE

Make three copies
Use two different types of media for storing your copies
Store one copy offsite

Also consider making exhibition or access copies. These are copies that are created from your original work or preservation master and that are used to provide access to the work. Making an access copy is another step in ensuring that no data is accidentally lost by minimizing the times you access or move the original file.

The Cloud is just a web-based service that gives you space on someone else’s servers and hard drive discs. The link here gives you tips on how to evaluate a cloud-based service.

I really recommend that one of your copies be on an external hard drive, or maybe 2. If you do choose 2, make sure that it is on 2 different manufacturers types of hard drives and make sure that it is large enough. 2 good options are Seagate and Toshiba.

If you work with very large files like video and audio, I recommend purchasing a RAID. (Redundant Array of Inexpensive or Independent Disks or Drives) They are more expensive, but sit on your desk, have more space, and are automatically mirrored across discs so that there is a very low chance of losing information. Since they are less prone to failure, you could have a RAID and then back up in the cloud and I would feel like that is pretty safe. You can learn more about a RAID here in this link. I would not only have a RAID as your copies, since if something happened to damage the entire RAID (like a fire or water damage or earthquake at your house), then everything would be lost. You should have at least one other copy stored elsewhere.

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Choose a File Format

Evaluate your needs and make a decision

Tips at DCPL Memory Lab (under “Formats”
Tips from MICA (according to medium)

Organize & Store

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Migrate Your Files

File formats

Tips at DCPL Memory Lab (under “Formats”
Tips from MICA (according to medium)
Memorylabnetwork.org
Library of Congress

External hard drives, RAIDS, etc.

Organize & Store

But remember that you will someday in the future have to migrate your preservation files to new formats. How will you know? Just schedule to check in every few years or so and put that in your calendar. We are also trying to keep this info update on the Memory Lab Network, and then the Library of Congress is also your resource! They really will answer your questions. storing your files in archival-friendly formats is only part of a digital preservation strategy. Digital media and digital storage are fragile and need upkeep. Make a plan to migrate, refresh and test your data. You will have to replace your external hard drives over time, I wouldn’t push them more than five years. And plug them in regularly to make sure they work.

WHAT TO DO

Use your inventory to keep track of the kind of formats and storage media you are using in order to assess if the software, hardware, and formats are still accessible to you. For example, if you initially decided not to migrate (transfer) a video art piece from a DVD to an external hard drive but are thinking of getting a new computer without a CD/DVD drive, you will now need to think about transferring that copy of the video to an external hard drive, your computer's hard drive, or consider purchasing a DVD player.
Access your files and/or storage every 6 months.
While some of your storage media may not be obsolete, it is a good idea to transfer your data to newer storage media
Perform test recoveries of data stored in third party services such as Google Drive, iCloud, Dropbox, or any other commercial storage service you use.
Don’t forget to follow your retention schedule and maybe re-evaluate it every so often.

TIP: Set yourself a calendar reminder when you need to check, migrate, backup, or test your files.

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Fixity

Checksums
Image Glitch tool

Organize & Store

Before we move on to talk about a tool that can help you safely backup your files, we need to talk about the term “fixity”. Fixity is a word that applies to any digital object that has a series of bits inside it where that ‘bitstream’ needs to be kept intact with the knowledge that it hasn’t changed, ie “fixed”. fixity of files can established and monitored through the use of checksums. A checksum on a file is a ‘digital fingerprint’ whereby even the smallest change to the file will cause the checksum to change completely. Checksums have three main uses:

To know that a file has been correctly received from a content owner or source and then transferred successfully to preservation storage
To know that file fixity has been maintained when that file is being stored.
To be given to users of the file in the future so they know that the file has been correctly retrieved from storage and delivered to them.

Show them this tool https://snorpey.github.io/jpg-glitch/]

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Automate

Exactly tool

Testing workflow

Organize & Store

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Automate

Fixity tool

Testing workflow

Organize & Store

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1. Inventory & Appraise

2. Organize & Store

3. Document & Describe

4. Access & Re-use

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Documenting Your Work

Document & Describe

Ascent of Weavers / Ascenso de Tejedoras, 2018. Rebeca Méndez with the Hernández-Quero Family. Museo de Arte Contemporaneo de Oaxaca, Oaxaca, Mexico. Photo by J. Ferretti, 2019.

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Ancillary Documentation

Research, meeting, critique notes
Correspondence
Proposals
Visual evidence of in-progress work
Photographic or video evidence of events associated with the project
Video or audio recording of interviews, artist talks or presentations
Video of installations or other type of three dimensional and/or experiential work
Slide decks
Event flyers, invitations, other marketing material
News and clippings
Exhibition and installation specifications
Instructions on rendering files
Copyright and access statements

Document & Describe

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Documentation Strategy

Note the components.

Example: art object, public facing events, research paper, etc.

From the list in the previous slide, write out the ancillary documentation you will most likely produce for each component of the project.
From the list created in Step 2, highlight the type of documentation that will most optimally convey important characteristics of each component of the project.

Examine equipment, storage, and time it will take and take this into consideration when making decisions.

Make an intuitive folder structure for organizing ancillary documentation.
Document your decisions (and your work!).

Document & Describe

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Describing Your Work

What is metadata?

Document & Describe

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Metadata

Technical
Preservation
Rights
Structural
Descriptive

Document & Describe

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Metadata

What is the difference between “describing” and “documenting”?

Document & Describe

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Metadata

Where does it go?

Document & Describe

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Metadata

Where does it go?

Sidecar files

Document & Describe

One option is called “Sidecar” files. also known as buddy files or connected files, are computer files that store data (often metadata) which is not supported by the format of a source file.There may be one or more sidecar files for each source file. In most cases the relationship between the source file and the sidecar file is based on the file name; sidecar files have the same base name as the source file, but with a different extension. The problem with this system is that most operating systems and file managers have no knowledge of these relationships, and might allow the user to rename or move one of the files thereby breaking the relationship. One of the most typical types of sidecar files will be your checksums: so each file of a work, which would be RivuletSoup2001211, would get their own sidecar file that is basically a text file that has the checksum written in it with the filename to link them.

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Metadata

Sidecar file MD5 example

Document & Describe

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Metadata

Where does it go?

Database
Metadata Template

Document & Describe

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Metadata

Where does it go?

MAMS or DAMS

Document & Describe

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Metadata

Where does it go?

Embed within the file

Document & Describe

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Metadata

Where does it go?

Embed within the file

Who, what, where, when, why
Copyright

Document & Describe

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Metadata

Where does it go?

Embed within the file

Batch automate guide
Add specific info as needed

Document & Describe

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Metadata

What’s the point?

Document & Describe

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1. Inventory & Appraise

2. Organize & Store

3. Document & Describe

4. Access & Re-use

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Copyright

Law to protect creator’s rights to make sure no one (re)uses works without permissions

Access & Re-use

Let’s start with Copyright. Copyright law is meant to protect your rights as a creator and states how others can use your work and how you may include others work within your own. Knowing how copyright law protects you and others from having their work stolen or used without permission will help you determine how to provide access to your projects and when it is legal to include other's work within your own.

*If you created an original work, then you are the copyright owner. You do not need to register your work with the US Office of Copyright to claim ownership rights over your original work. The law automatically protects a work that is created and fixed in a tangible medium of expression on or after January 1, 1978, from the moment of its creation and gives it a term lasting for the creator’s life plus an additional 70 years.

To know how others may use your work (legally) and how you may incorporate or reference other creators' work, you should familiarize yourself with three basic copyright concepts: Public Domain, Fair Use, and Creative Commons.

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Public Domain

Free to re-use; no copyright
Tool

Access & Re-use

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Fair Use

Allows (re)use of copyrighted material without permissions under certain circumstances
Tool

Access & Re-use

Fair use is a legal doctrine that allows the use of copyright-protected work in certain circumstances without direct permission or payment to the copyright owner. This doctrine provides a framework to determine whether a situation fall under Fair Use. To determine if your use of somebody else's copyrighted work falls under Fair Use, you need to examine the purpose of the use, the nature of the copyrighted work, the portion of the work used, and the potential effect on the market value of the work. Common activities that fall under Fair Use are education, criticism, news reporting, and research.

Generally, using copyrighted work on your thesis submission would fall under Fair Use. On the other hand, if you decided to sell your work then you would potentially be in violation of copyright law as the purpose of the use would change from research or criticism (Fair Use) to commercial use (not Fair Use). However, if the work you are referencing has a CC license that allows you to use it for commercial use, you would not be in violation of copyright. If you cannot determine if your inclusion of a copyrighted work falls under Fair Use and you cannot locate a clear statement of use from the copyright owners, you will need to contact the owners directly to ask for permission or consider using an alternate work in the Public Domain or under a CC License.

Another tool for Fair Use.

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Creative Commons

CC Licenses

Let people clearly know how works can be (re)used

Access & Re-use

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Sharing Your Work

Internet Archive
Social Media
Read the fine print

Access & Re-use

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Creative Cultures

Video on how copyright laws may or may not build a more creative culture

Access & Re-use

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Further Resources

Resources Link

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Thank you!

siobhan.hagan@dc.gov

@MemLabNet