Curating Metadata

What is metadata? Through both historic antecedents and its current definition, this panel will reflect on the creative possibilities entailed by its aesthetic dimensions.

At a time in which technology allows for more complex forms of conceptualizing metadata, it will also lay out the difficulties of the recuperation, preservation and diffusion of early digital art and media practices.

The participants will also discuss the relevance of metadata as a mirror for our times: both the risks of its biopolitical use and its emancipatory possibilities that look to other forms of community.

Three Key Lessons in Metadata Curatorship from the Héctor Pardo Collection

Walter Forsberg

Filmmaker, Archival Producer and Media Preservationist

CanadA

Walter Forsberg is a Mexico City-based filmmaker, archival producer and media preservationist. His films have been widely screened, including at the Sundance, Rotterdam and Toronto film festivals and at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. A graduate of the NYU Master’s in Moving Image Archiving and Preservation program, he has preserved audiovisual collections at the New Museum of Contemporary Art, the Museo Jumex and the Smithsonian Institution. He has worked on media preservation projects with an array of artists, including Cory Arcangel, Lillian Schwartz, Jesse Lerner and Naomi Uman. From 2014 to 2018, he served as the founding media archivist at the National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington, D.C. His institutional digitization projects have twice won the Innovative Project award from the National Digital Stewardship Alliance and he served as archival producer for the 2019 exhibition “City of Hope: Resurrection City and the 1968 Poor People’s Campaign,” which was awarded the Secretary’s Research Prize by the Smithsonian Institution. His recent writings on film have appeared in BlackFlash magazine, the Duke University Press anthology Screening Race in American Nontheatrical Film and the INCITE Journal of Experimental Media, where he is a contributing editor. His coedited issue of Canyon CinemaZine, about Mexican Cine-Espacios, will be published in early 2022. Walter is an adjunct professor at New York University and a 2021-2024 Fulbright Specialist in Library Science.

This brief video presentation outlines real world metadata practices for analog videotape collections in Mexico, with a specific emphasis on the Héctor Pardo Collection—a collection of approximately 2,000 videotapes and 500 films dating from the late 1970s up through the early 2010s that forms part of the collections of the nonprofit artist collective Laboratorio Experimental de Cine. Part of ongoing research funded by the Fulbright Specialist program, this talk considers several historical and preservation implications of Mexico’s lack of a national television archive and provides actionable recommendations for smaller-scale institutional efforts aimed at preserving analog videographic legacies.

Curating as a Creative Process in the Digital Preservation of Sound Art

Perla Olivia Rodríguez

Researcher (Institute of Bibliographic Research, UNAM)

MExico

Perla Olivia Rodríguez Reséndiz is a researcher and professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM), a member of the National System of Researchers (SNI) and coordinator of the Iberoamerican Digital Preservation Network of Sound and Audiovisual Files (RIPDASA) at the Iberoamerican Science and Technology for Development Program (CYTED). She is the vice president of the International Association of Sound and Audiovisual Archives (IASA). She is the winner of the 2019 Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Award, granted by the UNAM. She has served as production subdirector of Radio Educación and coordinated the Artistic Sound Experimentation Laboratory (LEAS), the International Sound and Audiovisual Archives Conference (from 2001 to 2013) and the UNAM International Digital Archives Conference. She also coordinated the team that founded the National Phonotheque of Mexico, where she served as Director of Sound Promotion and Dissemination from 2008 to 2013. She is the author of four books and 16 scientific articles. She has coordinated sixteen anthologies, participated in the translation of two works and written thirty-four chapters for different books. She has also produced materials for radio and contributed to educational and cultural television programs.

Preservation is the set of actions, methods and technologies needed to guarantee the long-term permanence of content recorded in a wide range of formats. In the field of sound archives, different formats using varied materials have been developed over the past century and a half. Processes have been identified for the preservation of these types of documents, such as collection and consumption, documentation, conservation and access. The digitalization of analog formats, as well as the rise of documents of digital origin, radically modified preservation and incorporated new processes that are relatively unexplored in the archivistic field. This conference will recount the transition from analog to digital preservation and will analyze the implications of the concept of digital curation for the creation of new digital content.

The Institutional Repository of Tec de Monterrey and Its Experience with Heritage Collections

Sara Rodríguez Palacios

Administrator of the Institutional Repository (Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey and Higher Education)

MExico

Sara María del Patrocinio Rodríguez Palacios has a Master’s in Computer Science and Knowledge Administration from Tec de Monterrey’s Virtual University. She is a librarian at the university’s National Libraries Department, where she is in charge of managing information resources in the Open Access department and the National Cataloging Team. She administers the Institutional Repository of Tec de Monterrey. She is a founding member of Red CAyRI (Open Science and Institutional Repositories) and facilitator of both the UNESCO Chair Open Educational Movement for Latin America as well as the local office of the International Council for Open and Distance Education: Open Educational Resources Latin America.

Managing a complex variety of resources that we could label contemporary, some of which are born in digital formats, constitutes a true challenge when speaking of the digitalization of heritage collections. In this talk, Sara Rodríguez Palacios shares her experiences in configuring and managing cultural heritage collections at the Institutional Repository of the Instituto Tecnológico de Monterrey and Higher Education.

Claudio Hernández

Preservationist-in-Chief at the Restoration Laboratory (University Museum of Contemporary Art, UNAM)

MExico

A graduate of the Manuel del Castillo Negrete National School of Preservation, Restoration and Museography at the National Institute of Anthropology and History, Claudio Hernández received a Master’s in the Conservation of New Media and Digital Information from the State Academy of Fine Arts Stuttgart in 2007. Since 2009, he has led the Restoration Laboratory at the University Museum of Contemporary Art. His work is focused on documenting, investigating and conserving contemporary art, and since 2011, he has cotaught the Collections Management course in the Master’s in Curatorial Studies program at the UNAM Faculty of Philosophy and Letters’ Institute of Aesthetic Research.