The Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU is offering a Digital Preservation Workshop for students and professionals working with digitized or born-digital collections, audiovisual media, and computer-based artworks.

This three-day workshop will explore digital files in relation to associated data, computing environments, and larger digital systems in which they are rendered and used. Taking the history of digital technology and computing into consideration, strategies and best practices for long term sustainable preservation of digital art objects will be reviewed. Methods to back up, restore, render, view and exhibit these works will be discussed.

During the workshop, participants will study topics such as file identification and risk assessment, safe data transfer, package management and the OAIS preservation model, digital file systems and storage, virtualization and emulation, disk imaging, the BitCurator project and digital forensics. The workshop will incorporate presentations and discussions, as well as hands-on lab exercises using both Mac and Linux computing environments and basic command-line tools used in digital preservation. Case studies will demonstrate the application of these concepts in time-based media art conservation.