VIVO

Artist websites are sites of art where ‘digital social memory’ gets accrued over time. As such, they require preservation care similar to other forms of cultural heritage. This essay describes several sets of medium-specific, socio-technical challenges to archiving artist websites connected to the processes of both archiving published materials on the web, as well as subsequently providing access to these materials via an indexed database. These challenges can be grouped under the rubrics of ethics, technology, curation, as well as cataloguing and sustainability. The primary focus of the essay is to discuss the challenges – and opportunities – associated with cataloguing and structuring digital archive (meta)data, by drawing upon findings from the practice-led research project to redesign the ArtBase archive of net art, alongside two further case studies. All case studies present critical engagements with Linked Open Data (LOD) software environments as means to collaboratively organize, store and provide access to heterogeneous archive data on the web. The possibility to capture and represent complex networks of relations and dependencies through the flexible structure of LOD is key to the concluding policy recommendations.

TIB VIVO