purpose

This blog is a documentation of a two-and-a-half week trip to California, USA to visit the California Digital Library, the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (BAMPFA), the Internet Archive and the International Symposium of Electronic Arts (ISEA).

This has been generously funded by a Friends of the National Library of Australia Travelling Grant - the first of it's kind to be provided by the Friends.

The schedule is something along the lines of

• arrive in San Francisco


• one day at ISEA - San Jose


• California Digital Library (John Kunze and staff) - Oakland


• return to ISEA - San Jose


• Berkeley Art Museum (Richard Rinehart) - Berkeley


• back to San Francisco

The purpose of this trip is to investigate models for handling complex objects. While I feel that I encounter complex objects everyday - the ones that I'm referring to here are of the creative output kind. In particular, I'm interested in the digital variety.

So the complex objects that I'm on the hunt for are mainly digital, and are objects made up of more than one file and preferably containing a range of file formats and a variety of relationships. I'm looking for the hard stuff that no-one quite knows how to deal with, and searching for models of managing and preserving this material for longevity.

Complex objects also referred to as compound objects.