This episode is audio from METRO's Digital Culture of Metropolitan New York community event, featuring a presentation by Tara Hart, Head Archivist of the Whitney Museum of American Art. It was recorded on April 8, 2026.
Announcer 0:00
Welcome to Engelberg Center Live!, a collection of audio from events held by the Engelberg Center on Innovation Law and Policy at NYU Law. This episode is audio from METRO's Digital Culture of Metropolitan New York community event featuring a presentation from Tara Hart, head Archivist of the Whitney Museum of American Art. It was recorded on April 8, 2026
Tara Hart 0:25
so I'm going to go back to around 2013 when I was working as a digital archivist at the New Museum in New York. Questions about institutional responsibility were central to my approach to archival work at the time when I acted as a core organizer of transfer station, which was a project that functioned both as an exhibition and digital preservation initiative. As I continue to reflect on what digital collections and cultural heritage stewardship can be at its best and most rigorous, I often return to this project as an example. At the time, I was the new Museum's first professional archivist, so I was working in a lot of different departments. They weren't entirely sure what an archivist did at the time, so I was in education, curatorial I like actually, in three years, was in three different departments, so but I was hired to lead the development and launch of the new Museum's digital archive, which you can see here. This is a screenshot from 2013 it looks a little different now, also from the way back machine. It was also nice to see everyone like going back to find these old projects. It's still online, but it looks a little different now. So the digital archive provides access to 1000s of digitized and born digital objects that document document the museum's program in history, collaborating closely with designers, developers, museum staff and students, I established sustainable digital workflows and helped position the archives as a central resource for exhibitions, education and scholarship. While I was hired as a digital archive archivist, I quickly discovered that there was a large body of physical institutional records that had not been formally processed, and they were actually next door in a museum building that the museum owned. But they were they were housed on one floor in an air conditioned space. Recently, the museum, just this building no longer exists. Recently, the museum just launched their new extended wing, which I haven't been to yet. So their archives comprised several 100 linear feet of curatorial records, artist files and audio visual documentation that were stored next door. This was a little bit different from my earlier experiences. I had worked at NYU sales library before that, where we had a traditional reading room and most of our access was done in person. There was a whole NYU Preservation Department dedicated to preserving physical materials. So part of this work also entailed processing a lot of the physical materials in addition to what was added to the digital archive. And so at the new museum, you know, we didn't have a we didn't have a traditional library or a reading room. So the aim of the project was to give access solely through the online digital archive. But a year into my tenure, I started working with the direct the new Director of Education, Johanna Burton, who and we worked on a project to transform the museum's Resource Center into a small exhibition center where we could do programming from, where we share material from the archives in person on the fifth floors Museum, and we installed some vitrines and video monitors around that time to Have an accompaniment to the digital archive itself. And Johanna, at the time, in her first six months, also implemented something called archive season. So it was sort of a boot camp of thinking about archives. And as part of this season, we worked on a project called transfer season. Station
Tara Hart 5:04
and transfer station was a project where for 10 weeks, the education gallery and Resource Center functioned as both an exhibition space and a fully operational digital conservation lab open during museum hours, where a team of Moving Image Archivists work to digitize materials housed in obsolete or legacy media formats, including audio cassette tapes, video and even floppy disks. Transfer station also began, became a public resource where artists could schedule appointments and come in to work with a technician and bring in their legacy media and have it digitized on site, and then a selection of what was digitized was also exhibited informally in the gallery on the video monitors. So the project addressed the history of video art, while also raising urgent questions about the future of digital preservation. And I'm going to just show a quick video that will give you a little more information, and I'll just talk over it as it plays, derived from a project proposal by the artist collective co lab, short for collaborative projects. Transfer stations sought to preserve a massive collection of video materials that were produced by the Monday, Wednesday, Friday video Club, which was an artist centered video distribution project established by CO lab in the mid 1980s to serve local video artists who had difficulty distributing their work or otherwise having it seen in mainstream venues. The MWF video club became a kind of DIY service center, producing, duplicating, sending and receiving VHS tapes that represented a wide variety of production by film and video makers, performance artists and writers. But when MWF ceased operations in 2000 around the same time, people stopped watching VHS tapes, their collection of more than 800 tapes, were moved to a storage locker in Staten Island. And so Alan Moore, who was a head member of colab and MWF, approached the new museum and proposed transfer station as a kind of search and rescue mission intended to preserve works of art by a generation of downtown artists whose media was at risk of disappearing, and address the wider Need for access to media migration and recovery services and
Tara Hart 7:47
and and in organizing transfer station, we asked ourselves, what would we need to responsibly transfer and preserve this material? Because we did not have everything in house at the new museum by any means. So the project required us to develop practical approaches to metadata, capture, processing, workflows and documentation during the transfer process. Realizing our project of the scale also required rallying institutional support and expertise from a wide array of organizations and individuals to meet the technical needs of the project, we hired a team of Moving Image preservation specialists from this community I had already been working with NYU Moving Image preservation program to inventory a lot of our VHS and pneumatic tapes at the new museum itself. So it was kind of like a natural connection to be able to work with a lot of students from that program who were wonderful. And we hired Walter Forsberg, who was a me up alum who was really instrumental in setting up the docking stations, the stations that you see here with an array of AV equipment, some source from eBay, some source from NYU, generous donations of equipment on loan. And so these players, we were able to do fairly professional, high quality digital copies. Think we also had some material donated from do art at the time, so we had, like, a really amazing array of conservators who were able to lend our expertise and time. This is just a shot of the tapes from when we were retrieving them from the Staten Island storage unit that I mentioned. So we took all these tapes and moved them into the UN air conditioned storage space, which was next door of the museum. Should. Ahead. Another important question that we faced was the challenge of long term digital preservation, as we've all been talking about today, how could we ensure that these digital fire files would remain accessible into the future? QUESTION We all, we are all living for so to do this, we partnered with the Internet Archive at the time and followed the ethos that distribution is preservation. We developed workflow in which hard drives containing the digitized files and their accompanying metadata were shipped directly to the Internet Archive. So also, you know, physical hard drive shipping. I'm sure you can relate, because you know what it's like. The transfer is one to one. So if you're doing you know this, you know, an hour long tape, it's gonna take an hour to transfer, and then it's to to upload it. It would be like so much time that we worked with Jason Scott at the Internet Archive, who was like, you can just ship them to us. So we actually packaged them and shipped them, and then the Internet Archive received them and added the metadata that we had sent over. And so it was very collaborative. So an important principle of that though, was that we accepted only materials that the creators were willing to make publicly accessible. Yeah, again, the idea that lots of copies keep keeps us safe at the time. And so there were actually three caches of material, the MWF videos that I mentioned in the Staten Island storage unit. And this is just a shot of our tapes at the new museum. You can see, you know, who doesn't love the digital, physical documentation, and that's David wanarovich on the right. That was one of the tapes that we digitized that you can now watch on the Internet Archive and at the new museum digital archive, if you want to see him reading
Tara Hart 12:16
and on. And then the third cache, which I don't think I have a slow was the digitized materials that were brought in by artists from public appointments. So all of those three collections are now on the Internet Archive that you can watch. So on the one level transfer station was a deeply pragmatic project responding to the urgencies of technological obsolescence and the fragility of magnetic media. But at the same time, the project created opportunities for pedagogical engagement and educational outreach to artists and museum visitors in transfer station, there were both successes and failures. Some appointments could not be completed due to technical challenges, and so not everything made it online, but thankfully, we have, there's hundreds of hours of footage that were successfully recovered and are now available. This is a shot of everything on the Internet Archive. There's around more than 500 of these digitized files, and we also received an Innovation Award from Library of Congress, and one review in art news even observed that quote, visitors unfamiliar with archival work found watching the digitization process surprisingly entertaining. I think that was an accomplishment. So transportation also became a way to ask larger questions about archives and institutions. What would it look like to imagine engagement in a deeper sense, not simply as programming, but also as a mutual commitment between institutions and the communities that they intersect with the word engagement, after all, is etymologically tied to promises, pledges and binding commitments. Transfer transfer station allowed us to pose vital questions such as, what forms a community, what skills or knowledge might be shared or transferred for the community to endure, and how, how might we support one another's activities? And how can archives support the needs of researchers, artists, students and the communities represented in their collections? So transfer station centered very specific histories and intentionally sought out voices and experiences that might not otherwise find their way into an institutional setting. And part of this you know, also means defining the researcher as broadly as Paul. Possible because archives serve many different audiences, and researchers may approach archival materials in many different ways, and so did my commitments. Learned. You know, throughout my time there has also extended to my work at the Whitney Museum, where I've worked for about 11 years now, and at the Whitney, we have a traditional reading room. I don't have slide where we do have researchers come in and view materials on site, and there were a lot of we have some digital collections, which I'll talk about a little bit that are hosted at DC, and what and why. And early in my time there, I implemented archivesspace For our archival catalog. And this is our website. And go there, that's really, that's really emphasize the physical a lot, I think, working remotely, like since 2020 also really, you know, very naturally focused on creating a more robust digital infrastructure at the Whitney. Let me focus my time on that. There was a project called MPI, the Moving Image Preservation Initiative, that was a grant funded project that I actually didn't work on myself, but was under the auspices of research resources, which is our department, and that project looked at Moving Image artworks and set up archivematica And our digital asset management system resource space. So once those two systems were brought together recently, I was able to piggyback on that system and link that with our archivesspace catalog. And here you can see our archivesspace
Tara Hart 17:14
screenshot of our archivesspace as it currently stands, and the pilot project that we use to i With this new system was our Sanborn Edward Hopper archive, which are the papers of Edward Hopper and his wife, Josephine hopper. And these were digitized through a Leon levy grant, digitized and processed through that grant. So we took this cachet as our first test case scenario where we worked with moving media. Who are the developers of resource space to have an API where we embed? I actually made this a link Allison let me know how I'm doing on time, because I realized I'm not actually recording wasn't paying attention, so hopefully I'm not going over. But um, so a unique, unique thing. You know, on the back end we have archive Matica for preservation, and then we can give access via resource space in our digital collections portal, which I'll also show you, but recently we also link from archivesspace to I think I might not be able, I didn't really set it up so that I can navigate and think through that. But you can navigate to all of our you can browse through the images at archivesspace, which is really nice, and then when you click on them, you will be taken to
Tara Hart 18:55
our resource space. This shows you the setup of how the metadata moves through the system. And this also shows you result just how you might browse through an archive space. And this is our resource space a little bit in beta mode, just hoping that maybe kind of all right is so this is posted in resource space as I mentioned. So there's two different ways that people can discover our digital collections at the moment, and this, as I mentioned, we have two collections that are hosted at DCM. And why so I recently tried to link those with our archivesspace. Yes. So this is a screenshot of an image that's posted at DCM, and why you can see it at DCM, and why, obviously, I'm here today, so I love DCM. Why? Because resource base doesn't have triple If so, I'm not that happy with the way that it's showing our textual objects because, you know it, as I said we piggybacked off of a system that was designed for a moving image objects. So I'm just happy to be here today and talk more and like learn more about maybe because there I do have a lot of technical questions about how I might speed up the process of linking from DCM WISE images to archivesspace, because the way I am doing it right now is actually a little slow so, but we can maybe talk about that afterwards or in the Q and A. Thank you so much. Everyone.
Announcer 21:00
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