The archiving of the digital universe...
Though I chose the larger category of "digital curation" for this professional synthesis, my more specific love is for theatre and performing arts archival work, whether analog or, increasingly, digital in nature. I therefore wanted to include a page with some thoughts about performing arts archives, resources for the information professional or theatre practitioner approaching the curation of performing arts materials, and examples of some theatre and performance archives of note.
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| Production photo from Roundabout Theatre Company's Cyrano de Bergerac11 |
As Laura Molloy (2015) has convincingly argued, the performing arts are in particular need of digital curation skills and practices, particularly outside the academy (which often already has such tools and professionals at its disposal in a general sense). Molloy (2015) surveyed many performing arts practitioners as to their attitude and actions regarding digital curation procedures, their understanding of archival work and its importance, and their own access to digital resources for their own research. Molloy (2015) found that, despite a vague impression that such artists privilege "the ephemeral live moment over the documented trace,"1 such an attitude was not, in fact, the dominating one. All the artists surveyed in Molloy's (2015) study believed that performance arts practitioners as a whole, as a discipline, should preserve their work; in short, however they felt about the importance of their own work's preservation, they uniformly agreed that preservation was vital to the discipline.
Digital curation is needed in the performing arts both for its indirect value and social impact, including the preservation of an artform that is inherently transient and which may require a variety of video, audio, and visual media, as well as textual materials - and for its direct value to artists, scholars, students, patrons, and the public. Performing arts archives are in particular need of the competencies, standards, and tools of the digital curation profession, though the current general lack of awareness of these may mean that a job-seeker in this niche field will likely have to be able to communicate the benefit of his or her work.
Jackson, Wheeler, and Quinn (2015) have pointed out that the ephemeral, finite and temporal nature of live performance, which cannot be captured and preserved in the same way as traditional research, should inform the performing arts data lifecycle. In this context, the term data can be applied to art, and the final artistic product is the research itself, the equivalent of a research study or paper in a scientific or humanities discipline, for example. How, then, to document, preserve, and curate artistic data and research?
"In support of performing arts research, the depth of the archived content combined with the domain expertise of the archivist offer significant potential for innovation in support of performing arts and the needs of performing artists as researchers."2 This archived content is increasingly, and helpfully, in multimedia formats - video, audio, photographs, text, etc. Librarians and curators who are themselves practitioners in the art, or particularly well-versed in the field or community, are especially well-situated to see connections and new avenues of thought, as the information professional and the artistic practitioner combine.
One example of a new approach that comes from the collaboration of informational and artistic expertise may be seen in the case of preservation of Chinese classical musical scores, as described by Jackson, Wheeler, and Quinn (2015). A new metadata profile was developed for the purpose of standardizing and documenting these scores, while "challenges to the development of a sufficiently robust yet streamlined data model include not just the characteristics of scores as documents, but cultural and artistic practices of Chinese composers and performers"3 and the resulting user interface allowed for searches to be conducted by title, composer, instrument, or soloist. While this archive contained only the textual score materials, rather than a mix of media and formats, it still demonstrates "how digital libraries and archives can adapt processes and document models to enhance discoverability of resources by practicing musicians and performing artists."4
Jackson, Wheeler, and Quinn (2015) also spoke to the question of legitimacy when performing arts practice is translated into written text, used "as a substitute for or supplement to the assessment and evaluation of creative output"5 and suggested properly documented and described annotations in video and audio recordings as data points - possibly, dependent on copyright conflict, as extractable annotations with timestamps for users to read in sync with a properly licensed recording.6
These are just a few examples of issues and questions that arise when dealing with the curation of live performing arts. Students, researchers, and artists continue to require access to fully realized (or as fully as possible) digital objects capturing the uncapturable nature of a live artistic work, and librarians, archivists, and digital curators should work to find new ways of filling this demand.
The American Theatre Archive Project (ATAP) exists to support theatre makers in archiving records of their work. An initiative of the American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR), ATAP's stated goals are:
ATAP's website provides several useful resources, including documents conveying value to different demographics (i.e., for theatre companies vs. for archivists), a handbook of guidelines for members, and an internship description and agreement.
The Theatre Library Association is a another organization dedicated to performing arts collections, archives, libraries, and museums. The organization "supports librarians and archivists affiliated with theatre, dance, performance studies, popular entertainment, motion picture and broadcasting collections. TLA promotes professional best practices in acquisition, organization, access and preservation of performing arts resources in libraries, archives, museums, private collections, and the digital environment. By producing publications, conferences, panels, and public events, TLA fosters creative and ethical use of performing arts materials to enhance research, live performance, and scholarly communication."8 TLA is an affiliate organization of the ALA, and are also closely affiliated with American Society for Theatre Research (ASTR) and Société Internationale des Bibliothèques et des Musées des Arts Spectacle (SIBMAS), their international counterpart, respectively.
The Roundabout Theatre Company, in New York City, is one example of a professional theatre company outside the academic world maintaining an excellent archive of production materials, many of which are accessible by the general public online. "Through dedicated funding from the Leon Levy Foundation, the Roundabout Theatre Company Archives were officially launched in 2008. During your visit, you'll discover production photographs, publicity materials, set and costume sketches, scripts, audio and video interviews, cast recordings, costumes, institutional records, theatre reconstruction documentation, and records chronicling our education program."9 As a personal note, I have myself used the Roundabout's online archives in my theatre research, so I can vouch for their direct value to me as a musical theatre scholar as well as general fan! Even more materials are, of course, accessible in analog forms at the physical archives. The Roundabout was one of the first, and is still one of relatively few, theatre companies to establish an institutional archive, "preserving our role in the American theatre tradition and making it accessible to the public."10