Maintenance Culture Seattle Workshop Recap
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! We at Myriad have returned to our desks this week feeling energized, motivated, and inspired—not only by the ambitious program we designed with our colleagues—but by the knowledge that our Seattle-area workshop participants brought into the room.
A diversity of institutions and job functions were represented in Seattle. Curators, conservators, registrars, archivists, IT professionals, AV technicians, and oral history specialists came together for two days to discuss their shared challenges in collecting, exhibiting, and preserving complex, born-digital works of art and to learn from our workshop facilitators about how to enact achievable preservation actions for objects that many cultural heritage professionals find challenging, if not altogether daunting. However, it was immediately made apparent with an early strengths-finding exercise that the desire, drive, and skillset necessary to maintain born-digital art was already present in the room.
The strengths listed by participants included things like:
“Staff in collections that want to do the best we can”
“Organizational culture prioritizes creativity”
“Tenacious problem solving”
“Relationship building and partnerships”
“Smaller staff with direct access to I.T. director—able to be more collaborative.”
Unsurprisingly, given what is listed above, collaboration and communication with other institutional and artistic stakeholders emerged as a key theme of the workshop. So too did others such as the imperativeness of documentation and importance of setting realistic preservation goals.
Observing the themes that we naturally returned to over the course of two days of conversation in Seattle was invaluable for Myriad staff and as a result we’ll be making some tweaks before our Baltimore workshop next month. Maintenance Culture is a NEH-funded, community-driven grant that is aimed at developing tools and training resources for cultural heritage workers in small and mid-sized institutions that collect small numbers of born-digital or time-based media objects. Which is to say that the process of running our workshops is an iterative one, with each workshop being somewhat different than the one that came before it. We are constantly working to improve and revise our curriculum, our methods, and our tools. We want to be sure to meet our workshop participants where they are by addressing their most pressing challenges and concerns when it comes to maintaining complex, born-digital creative works.
We’ll continue to keep you updated on our spring workshops here and in our newsletter!