eu co-operation

Symposium - Digital Archiving and Archival Networks

Museion, Museo d´Arte moderna e contemporanea,
Bolzano, Italy
15th - 16th November, 2002

The Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art (Musaion - Museo d´arte moderna e contemporanea) in Bolzano, Italy, one of the main partners and organisers of the international project VEKTOR, organised on Nov 15 -16, 2002 the symposium "Digital Archiving and Network Interconnection" (Archiviazione digitale e lavoro in rete / Digitale Archivierung und Vernetzung) as part of the exhibition "Art World di Nuova Scrittura" L'Archivio (Museion, Bolzano 13. 9. 2002 - 12. 1. 2003).

As one of the main Eastern European Partners of the Project, The AVU Research Centre actively took part in the two-day symposium - mainly in the part conducted only for Vector members.

Speakers invited from regional institutions to the symposium presented the digital form of their archives (Servizio Beni Culturali, Trento; Museo Civico, Merano; Bibliothektsverband Südtirol; Musaion, Bolzano). The speakers' reports on questions concerning software for the archiving of contemporary art made up a significant part of the programme. In most cases, attention was drawn to the present fast technical development, which also holds true for archive technology. In questions concerning the possibilities of digital archiving, all of its advantages were presented as well as various stumbling blocks. Digital processing of pictorial material not only represents a major opportunity for preserving colouring, it also presents risks related mainly to the duration of digitised material. The gradual interconnection of the individual institutional databases will also present a new perspective.

On the afternoon of Nov 16, 2002, there was held an internal meeting of the partners and participants of the Vektor - European Contemporary Art Archives programme (including (Basis Wien; AVU Research Centre - Prague; Archive de la critique d´Art, Rennes; documenta Archiv, Kassel; Goldsmith College, London; Institut für moderne Kunst, Nuremburg; Kunst-Bulletin, Zurich; Moderna Galerija, Ljubljana; Sikart, Zurich; Zentralarchiv des internationalen Kunsthandels, Cologne). The main point of this meeting's discussion concerned the final preparations of a publication that will include results of the international programme's three-year activities. The publication will provide information on various Vektor projects and related problems that appeared during the course of the work on the DC-Vektor database as well as a glossary of terms related to it. It will also contain descriptions of how to archive contemporary art, a number of specialised theoretical professional texts (such as certain problems with digitised documents, copyright issues, etc.) and a list of structural characteristics of archives of contemporary art in Western and Central Europe (within the context of the project's partner countries). The book will be published in 2003 in English and German while the appendices will also be in other languages (Czech, Slovenian, French and Italian). The content of the final symposium that will take place in Southampton, England in June 2003 was also discussed, as was the chance for further co-operation within the framework of the new project supported by the EU Culture 2000 programme.

At the afternoon internal meeting, the presentation of the >europeanart.net< (formerly E.L.A.N., European List of Artist Names) project also took place. The goal of this project is to interconnect various database systems containing material on contemporary art. Presently, this programme has been based on the co-operation of three institutions - Kunst-Bulletin Zürich, Basis -Wien, SIKART - Schweizerisches Institut für Kunstwissenschaft:

• E.L.A.N.
• Basis Wien
• Kunst-Bulletin, Zürich
• SIKART Datenbank

The AVU Research Centre is working on an electronic select database of artists that will become part of the >europeanart.net< project next year.

Other interesting Internet links include:

Standards:

• ICCD - Istituto Centrale per il Catalogo e la Documentazione (Ministero per i Beni e le Attivita Culturali) - ministry-based institute dealing in the programming, methodological processing and planning of project cataloguing the Italian cultural heritage.
• Dublin Core Metadata Initiative - open forum for the development of inter-operational on-line standards
• Unimarc
• Iasa
• Icon
• Usmarc

Digitised archives:

• Bibliotheksverband Südtirol - BISON - (Baden-Würtemberg)
• Kunst und Architektur
• www.prometheus-bildarchiv.de
• Archive of coloured slides

Inquiry regarding the digitising of archives of artistic works in Switzerland:

• www.kgs-umfrage.ch

Publication:

• Interarchive, Lüneburg 2002
• Lost in the archives, Holland, 2002

Museo d'Arte moderna e contemporanea

Museum of modern art in Bolzano was founded in 1987. The exhibition projects focus mainly on presenting the relationship between the two regions - Italian and German - on whose border Bolzano is located. The museum's collection includes some 1,700 domestic and foreign works and its specialised library offers 8,000 titles of modern and contemporary art. The Museion, one of the parts of the museum, has its own collection and library focusing on conceptual art, especially of the Art and Language group.
http://www.museion.it