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4. Towards archival interoperability

Capturing Unstable Media takes into account that the field of electronic media art is a large, international and distributed domain with many individual and institutional players, each with a different policy and approach towards research and development, presentation, archiving and preservation. It emphasizes the interdisciplinary, international, trans-institutional and process-based nature of the activities in the field of electronic media art, as a necessary addition to the object-focused approach that is still prevalent in the art and museum field.

The consequence of this approach is that data, information and knowledge about the specific activities in the field of electronic art is also not centralized at one point, but distributed internationally throughout the information systems and collections of many parties. The case studies in our research proved that necessary information related to various manifestations or occurrences of a project is often institutionally or geographically dispersed [40]. In most cases, in order to get a complete overview of an art project or a research trajectory, it would be necessary to consult the information systems of various institutions. The Capturing Unstable Media Conceptual Model was developed not only as a formalized stand-alone model - needed for capturing the activities in electronic art - but also as a tool for enabling this archival interoperability.

Taking into account the initiatives summarized in the introduction, it is possible to recommend possible points of departure for establishing interoperability between different archival systems [41]. Although every initiative and institution is using a different data model dependent on individual needs, it is possible to discover obvious shared concepts. A tentative list of shareable concepts is included below, indicating the extent to which the concept could serve as an entry point for allowing interoperability.

A general concept shared by most archival systems in the field of electronic art (and beyond) are actors; almost every data collection has a way to describe individual or group actors. Furthermore, several archival systems in this field contain a good amount of shared instances of persons and groups - as an example, many artists and theorists in V2_'s archive database also appear in the data collections of the Daniel Langlois Foundation.

Similarly, most archival systems also maintain a list or thesaurus of relevant keywords and/or themes. The resemblance between V2_'s and the Daniel Langlois Foundations keyword lists was researched in depth [42]; mapping between keyword lists is also a good starting point for archival interoperability.

Most archival systems contain concepts for describing projects, artworks and/or activities in a more or less detailed way. For some data systems, like V2_'s, a good and detailed description model for events is very important, since these activities provide important context for other archival items. However, projects, artworks and events are, unlike actors and keywords, described in a much less standardized and uniform way across archival collections; therefore, seamless interoperability will be hard to obtain. Also, differences in approach between an object-focused perspective versus a process-based perspective may prove difficult. The CMCM was designed with this process-based perspective in mind, taking into account that the static objects described in some archival collections might be integrated in a larger interoperability framework where these works become part of a longer and more flexible process. For example, a work exhibited in a museum and described in a static way in a museum collection's documentation system might, in an interoperable environment, be shown in the context of its research themes, research trajectory and further exhibition history, provided by other data collections.

A wide diversity of methods is used by different data collections for describing technical specifications. In some archival collections, these specifications are described through documentation (often texts listing detailed technical requirements); other data collections describe technology through keywords [43]. The diversity of approaches here, and the lack of more formal description methods of technical metadata and the interrelations between technological components is a major hindrance in promoting archival interoperability in this area. With its proposal for a formal description of technical components, the CMCM is designed for promoting further necessary standardization.

As a general conclusion of Capturing Unstable Media, continued efforts in collaboration between institutions and their collections, archives and data sets will prove extremely important for safeguarding the rich history and variety of electronic art activities, incorporating continued work on archival interoperability, ontologies and alignment with Semantic Web developments. As a continuation of Capturing Unstable Media, V2_ wishes to pursue further research in this area.