 Hello, everyone, about ready to get started now. There's no moderator for this session, so it's me. I'm introducing myself. I'm Joyce Ray from Johns Hopkins University. And I'll be talking about my talk is based on a meeting that we had last October on digital curation in art museums and what emerged from it in terms of promising practices and opportunities for education and research. And so this is based on the Master of Arts in Museum Studies program at Johns Hopkins coming out of that program. And then my area within that is the Graduate Certificate in Digital Curation. And I'll talk a little bit more about these programs too. The MA program was launched in 2008. It's mostly online, except for a two-week required on-ground seminar that's held various locations in the US and also outside the US. We have students from 44 states and 10 countries currently, quite a wide age range of students. So some are just starting out, some are changing careers that are doing something that they've always wanted to do and now they decided this is the time to do it. 70% approximately of our students are already working in museums. So this is designed as a part-time program, although we do have some full-time students as well. And about 9% have another graduate degree. And we already have over 400 graduates from the Master's program. We know that digital curation jobs in museums are emerging because we see job postings on the Museum L listserv. For example, things like collection data assistant, digital archivist, digital asset management specialist, digital collections manager, digital content manager, different projects manager. So all these different job titles, so we know there are some out there. We also know from a previous meeting that we put together in 2013 prior to launching the digital curation program, we brought together a number of educators as well as employers, including from the major institutions in Washington, the Smithsonian, the Library of Congress, the National Archives and the museum people who came told us they really do need staff with digital curation skills. They would prefer to hire what they call their own that is people with museum experience and a deep understanding of the museum mission, but they are hiring librarians and archivists instead because there haven't been opportunities for museum professionals to acquire the skills and knowledge of digital curation. So that's really what inspired us to launch this program. It was a little soft roll out at first. It officially launched in 2014 with a dual degree option so that students could come in and take just the digital certificate program alone of six courses, five of which were core in one elective or they could get a combined master's degree in museum studies and the digital curation certificate. It also is almost all online. We do have an onsite requirement that is part of an internship requirement for the certificate. We currently have about 35 students in the program. We'll probably have a few more by next fall because we have rolling admission, and we're admitting students all the time. So most of the students are also entering the museum studies program going for the dual degree in which case they get a two course discount. I guess you could say they get to count two courses towards both the MA and the certificate. So in that case, they complete a total of 14 courses. Otherwise it would be 16, 10 for the MA, six for the certificate. And the most common backgrounds in the certificate program, backgrounds in interest or in archeology, art and art history, collection management, history and historical collections. So the meeting that I mentioned was supported in part by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation. We also got a little funding from the Johns Hopkins Investment Bank, and we had this two day seminar, October 8th and 9th of this last fall. We had 29 participants that includes representatives of museum, museum archives, research centers, funding organizations, consultants, digital exhibition designers, myself and Phyllis Hatch who's the director of the MA's in museum studies program. And Diane Zorich who is a cultural heritage consultant who was actually fabulous to help us kind of scope the meeting. She made great recommendations. She was the facilitator and she wrote our final report for us. So we had representatives from 14 museums. I won't read all the names of them, but they're kind of a mix of some smaller college art museums, medium-sized museums and some very large museums around the country. Now I said 14 museums. There were 13 job titles from these museums. We had two directors and everything else was a unique job title. So chief information officer, one person with curator in his title. Curator of digital and emerging media. But we had a collections data manager, chief of digital imaging, associate media conservator, chief digital officer. So all these different titles, job titles are people who are involved with digital curation in their museums in some way. Okay, so our first topic was what do we mean by digital curation? Now we could have spent the whole meeting talking about this because 14 museums, 13 job titles, everybody kind of brought a different perspective. And I think the person who actually had the job title of digital curator for a museum was hyperventilating because he said he had never heard of some of this stuff. And he was actually hired I think to be a social media manager of social media program, although he had gotten into other things as well. But so we finally ended that conversation by saying, okay, well we've already defined what digital curation means for our program. So that's what we're gonna use during the course of this meeting. And what we say is the planning and management of digital assets over their lifetime from conceptualization through active use and presentation to long-term preservation in a repository for future use. And this of course is derived mostly from the definition and the digital curation lifecycle model developed by the Digital Curation Center in the UK. And I say mostly because, well for one thing they kind of keep changing their definition. But we added the concept of presentation to our definition because we feel that that's so important for museums. It's not just use, it's thinking about how you're gonna present digital assets as well. So these are the challenges that we identified to address. Sustaining and archiving innovative displays for audience engagement. Managing digital assets for preservation and access. Adapting curatorial practices to curating, displaying and preserving digital art. Okay, so topic one, going back to that was the definition of digital curation. Topic two, the challenge. How do museums engage audiences in innovative ways? How do they manage and sustain innovative digital projects? So this is the gallery wall from the Cleveland Museum of Art. A very kind of innovative concept where when you enter the museum, you see this wall and you can pull up with the touch screen. Any of these works that you see here read something about them before you go to visit the collections in the museum. And it was developed by this company called Local Projects and we had a representative from the company as well as somebody from the Cleveland Museum of Art talked to us about how they had developed these concepts. So the first question that came up is what is the shelf life of innovative experiential projects? And the first question that was asked of the person from Local Projects was, well, how do you sustain this work? And he started answering and it became obvious that his concept of sustainability was how well people remembered what they had seen and how they reacted to it and how long they retained that. So it was a completely different understanding of what is sustainability for them. So that led to what needs to be preserved? What is the archival unit of an interactive project and who is responsible? So we didn't exactly answer some of those questions but we did answer who is responsible by reaching a consensus view that the museum bears the responsibility of considering preservation at the very beginning of the development process not after a project has been designed and implemented. A couple of other, I think significant takeaways was included the idea that today's digital curation is retrospective and the recognition of that and that we are aiming for prospective digital curation. We should be moving towards building tool sets that people work in and that automatically capture and curate data at the point of creation and use. The focus must shift to making things curatable as we go along, not after an activity has been completed. Okay, so moving to topic three, how should museums manage their digital assets for long-term preservation and access? And I think certainly one of the most, if not the most farther ahead, I guess museums in this area is a moment, the Museum of Modern Art. So this was a presentation that I'm really drawing on by Ben Fino-Rodin who is the Associate Media Conservator at MoMA and he talked about the digital vault that they have developed that has three parts, what he called the Packager, the Warehouse and the Indexer. So the Packager creates an archival information package containing the objects, standard-based metadata and they're using Archivematica software. And then the archival information packages gets written via archivum software to very fast disk and tape. They have copies stored at MoMA Manhattan, MoMA Queens, and also offline at MoMA's Film Preservation Center in Hamlin, Pennsylvania. And they run integrity checks based on the locks model, locks of copies keep stuff safe so that if there's a corrupted copy somewhere, they'll replace it with a good one. And then they also have a tracking system and Indexer, they call Binder, and they said that they looked around to see if there was anything that would meet their needs. They felt that nothing did, so they developed this binder themselves which scans the archival information packages, extracts rich technical metadata, facilitates on-demand streaming access to all collections material, which provides both access and preservation. And this is open source and it's available on GitHub. So their entire ecosystem includes Stage One, which is acquisitions and registration of digital materials in a collections management system. Stage Two is the digital vault, the repository and access system. And Stage Three is the dams, the digital asset management system. And all systems talk to each other, but stages one and two are still human centered. So this ecosystem keeps the repository and access system in-house so that the total cost of ownership of digital assets can be estimated. They had concerns about cost and trustworthiness of cloud storage. And one thing that they mentioned that I think they're probably right that at least museums have not really considered this that in using cloud storage, if the company goes out of business or you decide you wanna move your data somewhere else, there's gonna be a cost involved and that may be very hard to project what that cost would be. So that was one reason that they wanted to keep control over it themselves. So that was the cost reason was, and the trustworthiness were both important factors in their determination to do this internally. Currently it's used only for collections assets, not yet for other holdings. So like your imaging and visual resources. And they also felt that it may not scale well if MoMA continues to acquire film at the rate it has been doing. That could be a problem in the future. It also, they acknowledge won't scale for small to medium sized institutions. They thought it could work on a consortium model or at the low end of the spectrum, small museums could copy their collections to hard drives and store them in different locations. They thought that Hydra in a Box is promising. However, they were wary of turnkey solutions that they thought might require considerable customization to meet museum needs. And so they felt that a near turnkey solution might be preferable. And a takeaway from that is it took MoMA 100 years to acquire 3,500 paintings. They thought it is not unreasonable to assume that in the next 100 years it will acquire more than 3,500 digital works. So definitely a challenging problem. So moving to topic four, how are curatorial practices changing in the curation display and preservation of digital art? So I just wanna get some clarification terminology here. You may often hear the term time-based media art which is used a lot in museums to mean works that have duration is basically what it means. So it's a beginning and an end whether it's a video or interactive work. It could often be the same as digital art but digital art doesn't necessarily, it's not necessarily time-based and by the same time you can have something that's time-based, it's not digital. But this is an example of time-based media art that was a portrait of late night talk show host David Letterman, Conan O'Brien and Jay Leno that obviously when you could play it and it has a beginning and an end. So that's an example of time-based media art. So speaking of digital art in general, challenges, lack of resources and expertise creates barriers to acquisition in the first place because people are concerned that they don't know how to preserve it or they won't be able to afford it and that that is probably resulting in a loss of some art that might otherwise be acquired by museums. There's an inadequate vocabulary to even describe the components and the functionality for documentation. There's a lack of criteria for determining what is the archival unit that should be preserved for future restaging and it usually is a retrospective endeavor. So after creation when we already said that that's not what you wanna do but that's the reality. So here's an example of a work in digital art, William Kentridge's Tango for page turning that was purchased as a joint purchase by a consortium of small art museums in New England and it provides greater access to the work and also enables institutions to acquire works that would be impossible if they did it individually. So in this case each institution has a copy but the work is displayed at only one institution at a time and in this case they also worked with the artist who was very excited and supportive of the idea of this joint purchase because it would expose the work to different audiences and it would always be on display somewhere but they've already found that each institution had different ideas about approaches to preservation. So that's their next step is to work through those issues collaboratively and come up with a preservation solution. One other thought that emerged from that and the idea was that large art museums might help their smaller peers by sharing resources and expertise. In turn small museums can give their larger peers access to new and diverse audiences. One resource that I just want to mention if you're interested in more information about preserving digital art is a book by Richard Weinhardt who is now at the Sammit Museum at Bucknell University written with John Epulato. Re-collection art, new media and social memory that has a lot of good discussion about approaches to preserving art that's digital or hybrid mixed media. So other summit topics that I'm not going to go into here but that are discussed in the report or the organizational challenges. Of course the technology is only one they're probably bigger challenges as the people and the processes. Digital art history, things like online scholarly catalogs and the role that museums can play in that. Collaborative access projects like the American Art Collaborative that is doing a linked open data pilot and international collaborations like the European Digital Library and the work of the International Committee on Documentation which is a committee of ICOM, the International Council on Museums. And then we come to the final part of our meeting and the final part of my discussion which is the discussion of education and research opportunities. And as I said just to refresh you in our certificate program we have five core courses three of which are taught digital preservation the foundations of digital curation course managing digital information museums that goes into a little more hands-on work with some software. But in addition to that there's an on-ground internship that it's a whole semester course but students must spend at least 120 hours on site with the host institution but they can complete the project online not necessarily there. There's also a research requirement that it's not really a thesis requirement but it allows students to explore do research on an area of digital curation that is of interest to them and there's certainly plenty of opportunities in the museum world there's so little research being done in this area that we feel that it's really gonna make a contribution to the literature as well as let students develop some expertise in their own area of interest and then they get one elective as well. So we really wanted to consult with this community while we had them there about how we could make this program as effective as possible. So we had the questions posed to small group breakout sessions. These are the questions that they addressed. What next steps can the art museum community take to move digital curation forward in their institutions? What are key principles of digital curation internships in art museums and what are the roles and responsibilities of all partners involved? Finally, what research projects might students and interns undertake that will contribute to digital curation and advance the museum's mission? And so these were some of the recommendations that emerged. One was to resolve the ambiguity that exists around the terms digital curation and digital curator. So we'll leave that to the broader community. I don't think we'll be tackling that. And really these recommendations are not just to us but to the museum community. So to themselves. Create an advocacy strategy, highlight good digital curation work that's going on in art museums, clarify principles of digital curation internships or residencies and identify partners and responsibilities, identify innovative digital curation research projects that might be undertaken by students or interns. So ideas for resolving this ambiguity was one is to recognize that digital curation is a core function. It's not an add on. That caring for digital collections is as critical as caring for physical collections. That digital curation adds value to digital assets. That it's more than just preservation. It should enable better visitor experiences across all platforms and facilitate interactions between curators and other users of digital collections and assets. It encompasses practices that overlay all museum professions and a diverse workforce is key to accomplishing digital curation tasks. Different points of view ensure that digital assets are cared for and used in ways that serve the widest range of audiences. So thoughts, recommendations for creating an advocacy strategy is one use professional networks to raise awareness in key organizations. Work with digital curators in other communities, i.e. librarians and archivists primarily, create low barrier professional development opportunities such as workshops and professional conferences and identify and support activist digital curators within institutions. To highlight digital curation work that's going on, they recommended compiling stories of easily relatable and understood successes, bust myths to dispel misinformation, such as the fear that if you digitize your whole collection and put it online that nobody will come to the museum, which evidence is pretty strong now that it works just the opposite, it attracts more people. And I can certainly say from the students, my students, if they don't see a robust website, when they visit a website, they just conclude that it's a kind of lame organization. And even though you might know that's not really true, I think younger people today just have that concept. Okay, they also recommended creating awards that recognize best practice in digital curation as well as innovation. And also raising awareness through programs in professional organizations and through internal channels. Clarify principles and internships, identify partners and responsibilities. In general, they felt they should provide value to the host institution as well as to the student. They should not be used just to fill resource gaps and they should offer lessons to the broader community. To identify innovative research projects, they wanted to invite relevant professional organizations to frame research questions of interest to their communities that might be structured into appropriate projects. And a number of these people are involved in these communities, so I think what I'm hoping is that this will kind of seamlessly eke out into the broader museum infrastructure. And just some ideas about internships or research projects. One is inventory and analysis of unorganized digital collections like removable media. I've already had one student who did that for her internship project. Possibly analyzing controlled vocabularies and recommend how those might be expanded. Analyze collection data for potential innovative uses. Study on documentation and preservation of user experience with technology. I thought this was interesting. Documentation of digital staff roles and practices in museums with the potential for comparing across them because I think museums are, they don't normally collect this kind of data and compare themselves with other museums. And so they're kind of each one developing their own approach and not, they don't have a good way for looking across museums and seeing what they might learn from comparison. And also assessing digital tools in use to identify gaps in improvements needed. Okay, so finally the report. And this was supposed to be the point where I said, oh, and I have some copies here that I brought with me that I'm gonna give to you. And unfortunately the FedX box went astray, so I don't have the reports. They just came out and they look great. I'm sorry. Somewhere in San Francisco. Thank you. But now this is a very long URL that includes the PowerPoint presentations as well as the Twitter back channel. If you wanna take a picture of it, go ahead, I'll give you a chance. Or you can just email me jray16, that's very easy at jhu.edu. I'll be happy to send you the link or I might even be able to send you a print copy if you want one. And so that's my presentation. I'm delighted to have so many people here. We're only more than I expected. So very interested in hearing comments or questions. And thank you.