As summer comes to a close and another fall ramps up, we wanted to take a moment to reflect on our Maintenance Culture summer workshops. In June we hosted a workshop in the library of the esteemed Menil Collection in Houston and in August we were in Detroit at Trinosophes—a mission-driven arts non-profit with an experimental music focus.

At Myriad, we are excited to embark on Library of Congress’ (LC) file format documentation (FDD) with a focus on collaboration, transparency, and efficiency. Our primary objective is to deliver highly relevant and accessible resources to the digital preservation community. In this blog post, we will explore how we aim to achieve this by outlining our goals and objectives.

Maintenance Culture held its first in-person workshop at the Seattle Public Library last week. This was an important benchmark for our grant as it was the first time that we have been able to put the curriculum and framework that was developed in concert with our workshop, skillshare, and tools and resources teams, to the test. What a thrill!

Maintenance Culture is hosting skillshare events in all six of its locations in 2023. These are community-based, participatory events that seek to bring together those who are involved in digital art at all stages of its lifecycle—its creation, its exhibition, and its maintenance.

One of the primary goals of our Maintenance Culture project is to cultivate communities around preserving born-digital art. We aim to bring together diverse groups of people—both artists and other creatives who work in the digital sphere as well as the professionals who are committed to exhibiting and preserving these works—in six locations across the country.

Join us for a Maintenance Culture workshop or skillshare in 2023. Creators, artists, and makers of born-digital, creative works are invited to connect with museum workers, librarians, and other maintainers of digital works at the skillshare. Maintainers of born-digital, creative works are invited to build community and learn about good practices at the workshop.

Myriad announces our new Project Director for Maintenance Culture, Elena Cordova. Elena will bring her extensive experience with museum collections, fine arts materials, and material culture as a consultant and worker in libraries and archives to this project, to lead it in its second year.

It’s Preservation Assistance Grant application time! Myriad can help you develop your project. Read about two PAG projects Myriad worked on: a digital preservation workshop, and a preservation assessment.

Myriad gathered a group of creators and maintainers of born-digital, creative works at a Charrette to start defining guidelines and building a curriculum for sustaining access to complex digital creative works. We asked Charrette participants to build on existing frameworks, to add information specific to works such as digital design, time-based media art, net art, and augmented reality. Read the blog post to preview some recommendations that will make it into the guidelines.

We gathered 20 people, most of whom had not collaborated before, together to work on Maintenance Culture guidelines and curriculum. To build some cohesion across the group, set a base for decision-making, and guide our work throughout the Charrette, we facilitated an exercise to identify shared values. Through this exercise, we established a list of shared values that will guide us in our work on Maintenance Culture.

Making of Maintenance Culture: Creating our Visual Identity - When we started Maintenance Culture we wanted a quickly recognizable visual identity for the project - something that communicates qualities of the work, catches the eye, and unifies materials that we create through the project. Abby Doyle worked with us to make our Maintenance Culture branding dreams come true. Read the blog for more on the process and results.

Myriad gathered people who create and maintain born-digital creative works to start writing guidelines and shaping tools to support small institutions preserving complex, born-digital, creative works. Part 1 of our Charrette Recap series highlights the fish bowl conversation that started off the event.

We’re collaboratively developing digital preservation training and resources, starting with a design charrette to engage stakeholders who create and maintain born-digital, creative works.

Myriad is creating Maintenance Culture communities in 6 areas across the US, to build connections across institutions, creators, galleries, and others interested in preserving born-digital, creative works.

Introducing Maintenance Culture: Sustaining Digital Creative Works