Lauren Cornell:

Hello everyone,

So on the heels of the recent ArtBase discussions on RAW, I'd like to open up the metadata conversation.

As some of you know, Rhizome's metadata, by which I mean the vocabularies and descriptive terms that index the content in our archives, was introduced when the ArtBase was founded in 1999. Since that time, the field of new media art has grown and changed dramatically, and we believe the metadata needs to reflect these developments. This conversation will involve a consideration of controlled vocabularies and folksonomies, and can also fold back onto issues recently discussed such as making the ArtBase a repository for code, as Pall Thayer and Rob Myers suggested. It is also an opportunity for Rhizome to collaborate with other professionals and organizations committed to digital preservation.

We would like to collectively address the metadata via RAW to get feedback and insight from the Rhizome community. After this discussion, Rhizome staff will have a wrap-up conversation with leading preservation scholars including Michael Katchen from Franklin Furnace, Alain Depocas from the DOCAM project at the Daniel Langlois Foundation, Dr. Sarah Cook co-founder of the list Crumb (www.crumbweb.org), Kenneth Schlesinger of the Independent Media Arts Preservation (IMAP), Caitlin Jones of the Variable Media Initiative (with the Guggenheim Museum) and now Director of Programming at the Bryce Wolkowitz Gallery, and Rick Rinehart, Director of Digital Media at the UC Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive. In this wrap-up conversation, we will synthesize the community discussion and finalize a strategy and process for Rhizome to move ahead. Our challenge is to come up with a set of changes that serve the interests of the artists as well as the wide audience that interacts with the ArtBase while keeping Rhizome's resources (technical, staff) and systems (membership) in mind.