Performing the ideal performing arts digital archive

Performing arts digital archives–you’ve seen them, you’ve heard of some amazing ones, maybe you’re working on or with one now. What are the most important pieces of a performing arts digital archive? What should one look like? What can they do? What could they do?

This session invites you to imagine the ideal performing arts digital archive, and, since we’re all into performing arts, perform this archive right then and there.

We’ll spend the first half of the session hashing out the top ten most important parts of a performing arts archive. Once we’ve reached consensus, we’ll break into groups and each “play” one of these parts à la charades for the other groups to guess. Part performance, part brainstorming, part game, this session offers us a chance to concretely discuss what we want to see in digital archives for performing arts and, by putting this ideal into immediate and fleeting action, also reminds us about the ephemerality of the materials we seek to collect and archive.

This session’s Google doc notes and lists of most important parts of digital archives for performing arts

Categories: Archives, Collaboration, Games, Session: Play |

About Leanora Lange

I am an archivist-librarian who has studied theater and German literature both in the US and Germany. As a librarian, I work on linked open data, crowdsourcing, jazz archives, and e-books. As an archivist, I'm currently processing collections of families who claimed restitution for the deaths of their loved ones in the Holocaust. As for theater, I'm investigating theater as archives and/or memory. As for Žižek, if I saw him on the subway, I wouldn't give him a dollar, but I might give him a tissue.