AVPreserve at AIC 2014

AVPreserve Senior Consultant Kara Van Malssen will be presenting at the American Institute for Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works (AIC) 42nd Annual Meeting in San Francisco, CA this week. The theme of this year’s meeting is Conscientious Conservation – Sustainable Choices in Collection Care. Kara will be on a panel at the Electronic Media Group Luncheon on Friday with Jim Coddington (Chief Conservator, Museum of Modern Art), Ben Fino-Radin (Digital Repository Manager, Museum of Modern Art), and Dan Gillean (AtoM Product Manager, Artefactual Systems) to discuss MoMA’s effort to design and build the first digital repository for museum collections (DRMC). This has been a long-gestating and much-needed tool to help ensure the long-term viability and sustainability of MoMA’s time-based and file-based artworks, and its development has involved a lot of critical, innovative thinking and collaboration across many of the departments at the Museum. Kara and AVPreserve have provided consultative support in various aspects of development for much of the length of the project. We’ve been excited and honored to be a part of it and to participate in the AIC panel. We’ve always enjoyed AIC for the great community and the fascinating, educational projects and topics that are discussed. Say hi to Kara if you’re attending.

Seeking Diversity and a Unified Field

When I was an undergrad there was a certain lament felt by various factions of the English department over the belief that teaching was becoming more difficult because there was less and less (perceived) cultural common ground among students and between faculty and students. In the past, they felt, it could be assumed that most students were coming in with at a least a basic knowledge of things such as the christian Bible, American history, maybe some classical Greek and Roman literature, and other canonical or popular works. With this presumed commonality, texts that may allude to such works could be easily dived into and discussed. Some felt, however, that it was becoming the case more and more that this was not true anymore. Whether due to the vast expansion of the number of works available and what was considered popular or worthy of study, or a shift to a more diverse cultural background in the student body, or the constant fluctuation of authors falling in and out of favor in the academy, or changing high school curricula, certain professors were finding that they first had to start classes by laying a groundwork of understanding that was not necessary before. They had to actually teach the Bible before they could teach the Bible as it pertained to or was the source of other works or historic moments.

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Episode 9 of More Podcast Less Process Now Available

Episode #9 of “More Podcast, Less Process”, the archives podcast co-produced by METRO and AVPreserve, is now available for streaming and download. This week’s episode is “All Archives Are Local: Talking with the National Archives & Records Administration” with guests Bonnie Marie Sauer (Archivist, National Archives at New York City) and Kevin De Vorsey (Supervisory Electronic Records Format Specialist, National Archives and Records Administration) discussing the work that NARA does to manage billions of records, develop collecting policies for an ever changing set of formats, and provide access and research assistance to the public. The scope and scale of what NARA is responsible for is not widely understood, and it was a fascinating, revealing conversation even though Josh and Jefferson just seemed to scrape the surface of this organization that is a critical to our understanding of local and national history, as well as being one of the main conduits for how we the people can interact with our government.

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We Do Not Preserve, We Sustain

So it’s Preservation Week — the true Old Home Week (ba-dum-dum!) — and even though the P word is a part of our company name, I am predictably nitpicky (predictably, and perhaps wearisomely, at least to my office mates, the poor kids) of its use for this celebratory week. Now, of course, preservation is probably the best sounding word and the one with the most traction (at least in the US), but overall there are certain burdens that come with the word’s connotations that make advocacy and communication about our profession difficult.

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