Digital Records Management for Artist-Run Centres

This poster will outline the ways in which Western Front Society, an artist-run centre based in Vancouver, BC, Canada, has developed and implemented digital preservation strategies, and how the work that has been done is applicable and beneficial for the broader non-profit arts sector in British Columbia and beyond. The first section of the poster will focus on the migration of digital assets to Collective Access, and how that system was customized to manage the Western Front archives, including digital assets (video, audio, images) and cataloging works and collections using the VRA Core principles. Then, the poster will outline the recent digital records management developments at Western Front, including email archiving using ePADD, web archiving using Conifer, and policy development, all of which is being designed to share with similar organizations dealing with arts and artists’ archives. This submission will be of interest for iPres attendees who work in organizations that struggle with funding and/or staffing resources, as it allows for an opportunity to speak about the challenges of small organizations dealing with idiosyncratic digital archives. Our work in this area began with a video digitization project and has grown into a website redesign, database migration, and a file server reorganization. The poster includes an embedded video from our archives, as well as a digital preservation workflow diagram and links to our website and an example of an archived web project in Conifer.