International Visitors Programme
From
Canada
Dates
19 to en 21 March 2018
Goal of the visit
From 19 to 21 March 2018, Het Nieuwe Instituut welcomes Stefana Breitwieser and Tim Walsh from The Canadian Centre for Architecture (CCA), experts in the field of digital preservation of born-digital Architecture.
The main goal of Breitwieser and Walsh' visit to the Netherlands is the Meeting of Experts: Archiving Digital Architectural Heritage on March 20. The digital world has become increasingly involved in collections, archives and libraries: first with the digitisation of huge amounts of analogue material, then more recently with the arrival of born-digital material. Archives of architectural firms which began using computers to create designs in the 1990s, present new challenges for Het Nieuwe Instituut's State Archive for Dutch Architecture and Urban Planning. Software eventually goes out of date, so how do you keep digital documents accessible? What should be done with the increasing volume of data that accompanies this digitisation of architectural practice? Has this created new research issues? These and other questions will discussed at the meeting of experts to mark the visit of Tim Walsh and Stefana Breitwieser of the Canadian Centre for Architecture to Het Nieuwe Instituut.
Het Nieuwe Instituut invites CCA's Walsh and Breitwieser to an exchange of knowledge and experience about archiving born-digital architecture. Among the subjects discussed at the expert meeting with representatives of Dutch archives such as EYE Film Museum, International Institute of Social History, Royal Library and National Archive, and firms like MVRDV and OMA, is how to open and view poorly accessible digital documents of the 1990s; how to preserve this material, and how to save and categorise it to ensure it remains accessible for future reference.
In addition to the expert meetings, Breitwieser and Walsh will visit the archives of Het Nieuwe Instituut, the EYE Film Museum in Amsterdam and Lima - international platform for sustainable access to media art.
Full report of the Expertmeeting Archiving Digital Architectural Heritage.
Function
Tim Walsh and Stefana Breitwieser are digital curators responsible for establishing standards, policies and procedures for the acquisition, handling, arrangement, description and access to born-digital archives at the Canadian Centre for Architecture. They supervise a team of Digital Processing Archivists and manage the digital depot of CCA.