Introduction to Digital Preservation and Storage

Amy Brost is currently Assistant Media Conservator, The David Booth Conservation Department, Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), New York. She works with the Digital Repository for Museum Collections (DRMC) and with the museum’s cross-departmental digital preservation team. She is an adjunct instructor in NYU’s Moving Image Archiving and Preservation graduate program and has taught in several workshops on the care of media art. In 2015-16, she co-developed the “Sustaining Media Art” phase of the Matters in Media Art online resource for the care of time-based media art. The project was a finalist for a Digital Preservation Award in Teaching and Communications from the Digital Preservation Coalition. In 2016, she earned an M.A. in the History of Art and Archaeology and an M.S. in Conservation of Historic and Artistic Works from the Conservation Center of the Institute of Fine Arts, New York University.

Jonathan Farbowitz is currently the Associate Conservator of Time-Based Media at the Metropolitan Museum of Art where he cares for the film, video, audio, slide, and software-based artworks in the Met's collection. Previously, he was a Fellow in the Conservation of Computer-Based Art at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York, where he addressed the preservation needs of computer-based works in the Guggenheim’s collection. He was part of an interdisciplinary team that restored three web artworks; Shu Lea Cheang's Brandon (1998-99), John F. Simon, Jr.'s Unfolding Object (2002), and Mark Napier’s net.flag (2002). Farbowitz has lectured internationally on digital preservation topics. He holds an MA in Moving Archiving and Preservation from New York University and has previous experience in software development and testing. (Photo by Paul Kamau)

Tawnya Mosier Keller is the Digital Preservation Head at the University of Utah’s Marriott Library. After working in moving image and sound archiving for many years, Tawnya moved to digital preservation in 2008 to tackle the unique challenges faced by the digitized and born-digital objects held at the Marriott Library. Some areas of interest include assessment and prioritization at institutions where, due to various constraints, not every physical object will be digitized for preservation and not every digital object will necessarily be receiving the same level of preservation. Tawnya holds an MA in Moving Image Archiving from the University of East Anglia.

Alexandra Nichols is a Time-Based Media Conservator at Tate, focusing on exhibitions and displays. Prior to working at Tate, she was a Sherman Fairchild Foundation Fellow at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and a Samuel H. Kress Fellow at the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum in New York concentrating on the conservation of time-based media. Alexandra Nichols holds an M.S. in Art Conservation from the Winterthur/University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation and a B.A. in Art History from the University of Maryland.

Mike Thuman is dedicated to working with organizations of all sizes to collaborate on the education, definition, and deployment of digital preservation programs. With 14 years dedicated focus in the digital preservation domain, he has delivered educational symposia, assessed institutional readiness, and helped plan deployments ranging in size from gigabytes to petabytes of data. In the community he has served as one of the instructors for the first Library of Congress Digital Preservation Outreach and Education (DPOE) national, train-the-trainer class. He has studied the leading standards that inform the domain and practitioners including ISO 14721 (OAIS model) through Nancy McGovern’s Digital Preservation Management: Implementing Short Term Strategies for Long-term Problems workshops and he completed the first High Level Training Course on ISO 16363 for Managers of Digital Repositories held in the US. Experienced at gaining a deep understanding of institutional challenges and use cases, he places high importance on collaboration and ensuring project success. In his spare time, he served two terms on the Board of Trustees for the Summit County Library System and is a community advocate through an advisory service (Digital Enduro, LLC) for using technology to improve the human experience.