Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum
Written by Kate Sloss on Fri, 02/26/2016 – 12:25
Our challenge is to create new workflows for managing and preserving born-digital records, and embed them into the regular duties of staff at the Guggenheim. Our area of inquiry is curatorial and exhibition records, which range from correspondence with artists to CAD files of exhibition layout drawings.
In 2013-14 we received a grant from NHPRC for a planning project which:
- surveyed each our department’sal records retention schedule for born-digital files;
- analyzed media types and vulnerability;
- established an OAIS-compliant repository for born digital records;
- recommended action plans and workflows;
- addressed preservation, sustainability and access issues.
We therefore have an excellent basis for preserving electronic records in a dedicated repository, but we have not yet been able to implement it because of lack of resources and steady, high demand for our other services.
What makes our project idea especially interesting is that we want to focus on the human and organizational aspects, and look specifically at how curators document their work. This is the group of staff within the museum which, more than anyone, creates and receives material of long term interest to researchers. Typically their work is in small project teams, with two or three concurrent projects for most curators – exhibitions, publications, acquisitions of new artworks – lasting between six months and three years. We know that any new workflow must be developed in collaboration with our curatorial colleagues and it must be easier for them to comply with than to ignore.
We will be asking the METRO Fellow to address these urgent research questions:
- What changes do we need to introduce into a curator’s regular working processes?
- How can we achieve necessary changes without adding to the complexity or volume of their workload?
- How can we sustain new working practices with limited resources from the Library & Archives department?
The Fellow will conduct one or more case studies with organizations in other sectors, to identify good practice in email management and, in particular their use of filing structures for email inboxes. We hope this will assist us in creating a folder structure for curatorial department emails, mirroring our retention schedule for paper records. This will make it easy for curators to transfer a file of email records to the Archives once their work on an exhibition is completed, and ensure that unique and valuable research material can be made accessible to researchers in the future.
We have a project idea which I believe will present a really interesting challenge and an opportunity to develop practical solutions within nine months which will be widely applicable to other organizations.
Kate Sloss
Director of Library and Archives
February 25, 2016