NISO Webinar with 2015 Arts Writing Awards Recipient, Jon Ippolito
| May 6, 2015 | |
| Digital & Media Art |
2015 Arts Writing Awards recipient Jon Ippolito will give a presentation for the NISO (National Information Standards Organization) Webinar, Software Preservation and Use: I Saved the Files But Can I Run Them?
Ippolito’s presentation is titled, No, You Can’t Expect To Run Your Files Just Because You Saved Them.
The webinar is scheduled for Wednesday, May 13th from 1:00 p.m. until 2:30 p.m. You may register for the webinar here.
From the NISO website:
The digitization of resources can provide expanded access to information as well as a preservation mechanism for now-fragile materials. Preserving the digital copy of the resource is an issue now being addressed, but what about the software used to create digital files? How can software on media which can no longer be read — or no longer be read easily — be preserved? If that software can’t be accessed, what happens to the material created by, and only read by, that software?
Progress has been made in formulating standards for the preservation and description of digital materials and a framework for addressing digital item preservation has been proposed. Despite, however, meetings such as the Library of Congress’ Preserving.exe: Toward a National Strategy for Preserving Software, no formal standard or framework yet exists for software digitization and preservation. This webinar will feature three presenters who will speak on aspects of software digitization and preservation, including a how-to approach (technical aspects), a metadata component, and observations from the field as part of the continuing discussion on the state of the field and the need for standardization.
About Ippolito’s presentation:
Storage media are the Maginot Line of digital preservation. To defend against the corruption of the 1s and 0s that account for most 21st-century culture, the guardians of heritage have erected a bulwark built of hard drives, flash memory, the cloud and even futuristic technologies like DNA storage. Yet even if we manage to save our bits unchanged for eternity, obsolescence will circumvent our fixed fortifications unless we remember how to reconstruct the software, hardware and cultural environments that originally gave these bits meaning.
To adapt to this larger threat means recognizing the limits of fixity and looking to more performative models of preservation. Drawing on themes from his 2014 book Re-collection (http://re-collection.net) co-authored with Richard Rinehart, Jon Ippolito examines how proliferative preservation has rescued a broad range of culture, from videogames to sculptures to errant spacecraft.