Portals
In the Portals exhibition, you can listen to stories from archival and research practice about using born-digital archives in an audio tour. You can also listen to these audio fragments below.
Acquiring
When the Nieuwe Instituut acquired MVRDV’s born-digital archive in 2016, the whole archive was obtained. But is it possible to process, record and archive vast amounts of digital material when the sheer size of the archive is so overwhelming?
Receiving
How do we evaluate what is worth keeping, preserving and accessing for the future when hardware is so rapidly becoming obsolete?
Archiving
Sometimes the DigiLab gets requests to digitize files that already exist within the born-digital archive but are difficult to find. This absurd process reflects our own digital behaviours.
Preserving
Are back-ups really to be trusted as accurate duplicates of information? Can the archivist take the architect’s word in that the hardware’s content is really true and accurate? How can archivists really know unless they check every single one of the thousands of zip disks?
Accessing
Changing file formats, missing links and software glitches are just some of the challenges faced when exploring a born-digital archive.
Using
Artistic experiments with the born-digital archive help us understand how it can be used in the future.