Electronic Information and Digitization: Preservation and Security Challenges
Maxwell L. Anderson
Director, Whitney Museum of American Art

This paper will consider obstacles and solutions ahead for administrators who seek to preserve intellectual property in digital form, with an emphasis on museums and libraries. While museum and library professionals have always assumed that preservation of the evidence of the past is our primary responsibility, that assumption is being mightily tested by the advent of digital media. These three primary obstacles are: our instinctive devotion to preserving all artworks and intellectual property at any cost, the instability of a digital platform, and the fluid and seemingly infinite permutations of any digital experience. This paper will review some of the implications for stewards of cultural resources of this new borderless language of human expression.

It will culminate with observations on some of the problems in preserving obsolescent hardware and software solutions, new interpretations of copyright law, shifting platforms of media presentation, and choices involved in the simulation of experiential conditions instead of their replication. It will offer a few limited suggestions about how to record the desires of visual and performing artists and authors using digital technology whose work is platform-dependent, as a means of ensuring that their intentions are documented -- and their leanings with regard to conservation options are considered. It will also consider the work of artists who are creating works exclusively experienced in a digital environment. Finally, we will speculate about the preservation of an art experience's aura in the face of a VR-rich consumer environment. All of these questions take on a new sense of urgency in our media-saturated world.

Even with an ambitious effort to reanimate forgotten recording and projection equipment, we will have to make peace with the likelihood that the original character of digital experiences will never be recaptured in their entirety. Through meticulous conventional documentation by interviewing artists, we will have to accommodate ourselves to the simulation of experiential conditions instead of their replication. The tolerance of relative degrees of accuracy on the part of artists and experts will be mightily tested as we make our way into these uncertain waters.