Ok, I'll bite. Remember that these are my opinions and not necessarily
those of my employer.
For anyone making art after say, 2000, there's as much or more
information online than on paper. (in the strictly informational and
not artifactual sense--Nicholson Baker and all that). The online info is
usually much more substantial than an e-mailed announcement. And it's
fairly well indexed in Google (no flames about that, please).
That said, for paper-era artists, announcements are and remain
important, too. But so is their digital info. To track Picasso you need
*both.*
Preserving digital info is a problem we share with everyone from Obama
to Twitter. It took about 100 years to figure out how to preserve paper
and as with any media transition, much was lost. Chances are, early
digital info will be lost, too.
As for printing things out, consider that digital documentation is
*conceived and structured as digital.* It's *different* from paper info
and printing it out is, one can argue, "dishonest." It needs to be taken
on its own terms.
To address the inevitable "if the internet breaks we'll still have
paper" argument, if the internet breaks, exhib announcements will be the
least of our problems. For one thing, information produced and
distributed today *is* digital.
Finally, to get grandiose, I also submit that in the digital world,
doing history itself will be different. One might be data mining or
keyword searching e-mails as much or more than sifting through paper
files. We need to *anticipate* that.
And now, some concrete suggestions:
1. if you are any kind of an arts institution, *do periodic backups.*
Ditto for artists. I call this the Way Back Machine approach. If nothing
else you'll have snapshots. As for obsolete software, well, we all have
that problem and chances are the solution won't come from art
librarians.
2. consider an organized effort to do the above. The art
librarian/archive community is well-positioned to do this.
3. if you can't support paper files, consider what I call the Andy
Warhol approch. Sweep it off your desk. Put it in a box. Date the box.
Ideally, catalog. Store. Period.
There you go. I hope to provoke lots of digital discussion.
Jennifer Tobias
MoMA Library
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