A team of digital archivists is in a race against time to save Australia's digital heritage stored on obsolete systems or failing electronics.
The challenges include deteriorating magnetic computer disks, obsolete computer hardware and software dependencies.
“Preserving these creations is urgent," says Melanie Swalwell, professor of Digital Media Heritage at Swinburne University of Technology.
"These media are unstable, and the artists involved with them are getting older. The artworks are on obsolete media, like floppy disks and optical media, and rely on obsolete operating systems and hardware."
The rescue team has just released a report on the project, Archiving Australian Media Arts: Towards a method and a national collection.
Swalwell's team has emulated a wide range of media in collaboration with leading cultural institutions such as the Australian Centre for the Moving Image (ACMI) and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, including 50 Australian game titles developed in the 1990s, and interactive media artworks exhibited by Experimenta Media Art and dLux MediaArts in the mid 1990s.
“Born digital content has not been traditionally valued once it becomes old, sometimes because it was viewed as trivial or seen as too hard to preserve," says Swalwell.
"From old Nintendo Games to digital artworks, we’re now trying to collect and preserve these digital media pieces while they still exist.”
Carolyn Murphy, head of conservation, Art Gallery of New South Wales, says paper has got few problems when compared with digital media.
"The work we’re doing here to figure out how to look after things and how to store them and keep them available to access for future generations in the same way that we keep paintings and sculptures and works on paper in museums…this is so important...it’s a new frontier," says Murphy.
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