Rhizome is an art organization, and they are approaching it in the context of art, rather than online culture. They began implementing an archiving project in t

Rhizome is an art organization, and they are approaching it in the context of art, rather than online culture. They began implementing an archiving project in the early '00s called Art Base that contains over 2000 works. These new efforts are an extension of that, bringing in current thinking on virtualization and emulation. It is a challenging project. Many of these project have both client and server side technologies that must be recaptured, so it is more than just Flash (or Director/Shockwave). I made a project called Airworld that may be part of this Rhizome initiative [1]. It was originally commissioned by the Walker Art Center in 1999 and ultimately involved two different servers that used Perl CGI scripts, mySQL and RealServer on the back end, HTML and RealMedia plugin on the client side. The museum lacked the infrastructure and personnel to keep it alive and it slowly died over the course of 10 years. Even though it's still in the institutions collection. It is a big problem for 'off-line new media' too. Artist's CD-ROMs, for example. The Rose Goldsen archive of New Media Art at Cornell University Library has made a huge effort to maintain these works [2]. And physical, sculptural 'New Media' works also take massive effort to maintain. I know from experience. [3]. Museums are experts in conversation. They are beginning to think about the challenges that digital technologies bring. But there is a lot of work to do. [1] http://www.walkerart.org/collections/artworks/airworld http://www.walkerart.org/collections/artworks/airworld [2] http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/general/cd.php http://goldsen.library.cornell.edu/general/cd.php [3] http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/2002.274a-e/ http://www.metmuseum.org/toah/works-of-art/2002.274a-e/