1. INTRODUCTION  Overview of digital preservation activities at Tate  Introduction to the PERICLES project  Summary of the use cases and key challenges Tate is bringing to the PERICLES project  The use of ontologies for describing and modelling artworks and their environments

2. BACKGROUND  Tate holds the national collection of British art and international modern and contemporary art. Tate Archive holds over a million records on British art from 1900 to the present.  Tate has 3 sites in London (Tate Modern, Tate Britain and Tate Stores) as well as galleries in Liverpool and St. Ives, and employs over 1000 staff.

3. a) DIGITAL COLLECTION ITEMS -Born Digital Artworks and Archives -Collection items that need to be migrated to digital

4. b) DIGITISED REPRESENTATIONS OF COLLECTION ITEMS

5. c) DIGITAL RECORDS Anything created or received by a Tate employee in the course of their work -Internal documentation -Images and event recordings -Audio-visual material -Conservation science data -Social Media and blogs -User-generated content …etc

6. DIGITAL PRESERVATION AT TATE  Digital Preservation and Continuity Policy establishes principles and responsibilities for ensuring access to digital assets for as long as they’re needed.  Training and guidance for staff on digital asset management, metadata and digital preservation principles  High-Value Digital Asset storage – long-term managed storage for digital collection items and other high-value digital objects.  Pilot projects for development of workflows, metadata schema, etc

7. PRESERVATION STORAGE - ARKIVUM  In 2013, Tate went out to tender for a digital storage system suitable for preservation. This was possible due to funding from the Heritage Lotteries Fund for the Archives and Access project. The tender was won by Arkivum for an on-site version of their system. http://arkivum.com/site/  High level of redundancy and resilience. Different to a standard storage system in that file integrity is constantly monitored.  Replicated across two Tate sites, plus a third off-line copy. Appliance running Arkivum software, disk layer and tape library at each site.

8. DIGITAL VIDEO PILOT - ARCHIVEMATICA  Tate has approx. 500 video artworks in its collection. From the early 1990s, uncompressed copies of these videos were created on digital video tape at the time of acquisition and these have been migrated onto new stock every 7-9 years.  The next migration will need to be onto digital file-based storage. This process requires the development of new policies, systems and workflows.  A pilot project is currently underway to test the use of Archivematica for the ingest of digital video artworks.

9. What is PERICLES? Promoting and Enhancing Reuse of Information throughout the Content Lifecycle taking account of Evolving Semantics  4 year FP7 EU-funded project addressing the challenge of long- term access to digital content in continually evolving environments (1 Feb 2013 – 31 Jan 2017)  With a consortium of 11 Partners This project has received funding from the European Union’s Seventh Framework Programme for research, technological development and demonstration under grant agreement no601138

10.  Observation that digital objects and related metadata are generated as a continuum within a continually changing environment Motivation Change might lead not only to loss of access or functionality, but to loss of meaning and understanding of information

11. PERICLES APPROACH  Preservation by Design  Preservation is embedded into the design and architecture of data curation and records management practices  Capture and modelling of the Environment  Understand the wider context around digital objects that impacts their long-term reuse  Model-Driven Approach  Representing the eco-system of a digital object and using this to drive processes needed for preservation activities

12. ART AND SCIENCE USE CASES MEDIA USE CASE Focus on digital artworks and other digital media from Tate’s collection including: ● Software-based artworks; ● Digital video artworks; ● Born-digital archives from artists’ estates and from institutional records SCIENCE USE CASE Focus on space science data transmitted from the International Space Station to B.USOC (Belgian User Support and Operations Centre). This includes: ● Operational data ● Engineering documentations; ● Scientific data: accepted as raw data and then processed to include information from instrument calibration.

13. USE CASE – DIGITAL VIDEO ARTWORKS Key Challenge: What are the circumstances where there is a risk of inconsistent playback of video? A number of different factors can affect the consistent playback of a video file, particularly affecting the colour, resolution and the aspect ratio of the image. The dependencies which create these variations in playback include the behaviour of different players in interpreting the file and container information.

14. SIGNIFICANT CHARACTERISTICS RELATING TO VIDEO PLAYBACK  The significant characteristics of a video file need to be understood and documented in order to assess whether a file has been played back or reproduced successfully. The characteristics often affected include:  Aspect Ratio  Colour space types (conversion matrices)  Chroma subsampling  Interlacement  YUV sample range  Codec-specific considerations  Frame Rate These characteristics are outlined in a report by Dave Rice, available on the Tate website: http://www.tate.org.uk/research/publications/sustaining-consistent-video- presentation  Inconsistent playback can for instance be a result of two video players identifying a video stream differently, and therefore using different codecs to read the same file.

15. Frames from: Ion Grigorescu, Balta Alba, Tate, X47705

16. USE CASE - SOFTWARE-BASED ARTWORKS Software-based artworks have complex relationships and dependencies, often including hardware and networked components. To ensure preservation of the intended behaviour of a work, it will be important to document and understand these dependencies as well as the intentions of the artist. For PERICLES, the focus is on defining significant properties (or ‘work- defining’ properties) and dependencies

17. EXAMPLE - BECOMING Michael Craig-Martin, Becoming (2003)

18. VIRTUALISATION Patricia Falcao (Time-Based Media Conservator, Tate) and Annet Dekker have been researching the use of virtual machines for software-based artworks. Virtualisation can be used as:  A diagnostics tool, to help identify and document technical dependencies  A preservation strategy (with limitations) For more information see the paper ‘Virtualisation as a Tool for the Conservation of Software-Based Artworks’ presented at iPRES 2014: http://pericles-project.eu/publications/22

19. TECHNICAL CHANGE AND ARCHIVE CATALOGUING  Changes in the types of object being described have exposed the limitations of existing standards  Standards such as ISAD(G) are format agnostic, but only have limited ability to describe digital objects  There is a need to:  Define where the significant properties of digital objects differ from non-digital (from the perspective of the researcher)  Incorporate metadata on these into traditional cataloguing practice

20. TECHNICAL CHANGE AND ARCHIVE CATALOGUING  Cataloguing practice has always been influenced by technology  Archival catalogues have changed in form and content as cataloguing technology has changed, e.g. paper lists, card indexes, library systems, archive databases  Technological change affects standards, and vice versa

21. TECHNICAL CHANGE AND ARCHIVE CATALOGUING  As archival material changes, so do the types of research based upon it  Archives need to be aware of changing uses of their material, and update practice to ensure they supply information to facilitate changing use

22. SIGNIFICANT PROPERTIES AND ARCHIVEMATICA  Assess impact of Archivematica’s default workflows for normalisation on significant properties  Building on research into cataloguing and the metadata required by researchers  Based on a representative set of files types from Tate Archive  Involving use of tools for extracting significant properties as well as Archivematica

23. WHAT IS AN ONTOLOGY? “... a formal, explicit specification of a shared conceptualization...” [Studer et al., 1998]  Upper ontology: A model of the common objects that are generally applicable across multiple knowledge domains.  Domain ontology: A model of concepts that belong to a specific domain or part of the world. machine readable with computational semantics unambiguous concepts, properties, functions, axioms definition commonly accepted consensual knowledge abstract, simplified model of a domain [Studer et al., 1998] Studer, R., Benjamins, V.R. and Fensel, D. (1998), Knowledge engineering: Principles and methods. Data & Knowledge Engineering, Elsevier Ltd, Vol. 25, Issues 1-2, pp. 161-197

24. WHY MODELS?  Model – abstract representation (of some aspects) of a digital ecosystem  Knowledge modelling  Machine-processable way to express concepts and their relationships  Reasoning to derive further knowledge  Behavioural modelling  Encapsulation and visualisation  Enable simulations and predictions  Reduce effort

25. LINKED RESOURCE MODEL AND THE DOMAIN ONTOLOGY  Main notions adapted from the LRM in the Art and Media ontology:  Resource  Agent  Activity  Dependency  Description

26. DOMAIN ONTOLOGY – SOFTWARE-BASED ART Entities:  Software-Based Artwork (Abstract level of artwork, vs concrete level of the instance)  Agent (e.g. Human, Software)  Activity (e.g. Access, Conservation)  Dependency (e.g. Hardware, Software, Data/Information)  Intention – functional, conceptual

28. PERICLES Extraction Tool (PET)  for the extraction of significant information from the environment where digital objects are created and modified  based on sheer curation principles, works within a live system  the tool is generic – it can be adapted for various scenarios  open source (Apache 2 licensed) Java software  available on GitHub: https://github.com/pericles-project/pet

29. POTENTIAL FOR A SHARED ONTOLOGY FOR DIGITAL ARTWORK Moving from metadata schemas to models to capture complex digital environments. Would a community approach to developing a shared domain ontology be beneficial? Shared language for sharing knowledge and identifying areas for further research

30. Julia Scher interviewed at SFMOMA as part of the Artist Initiative. Courtesy of SFMOMA A major international conference focused on the intersection of media art and technological change over time. How is this shifting the way museums operate and how conservation works? Tate Modern 18, 19 & 20 November 2015 http://www.tate.org.uk/whats-on/tate-modern/conference/media-transition @MediaInTrans #MediainTrans