To save or not to save? Preserving our Online Heritage. The preservation of contemporary networked art works presents an enormous challenge to collectors and museums, most of whom are still attempting to fit these diverse practices into their rationales and exhibition strategies. Unfortunately acquisition and conservation measures are sparse, despite the plethora of entertaining challenging and innovative online works produced over the past decade. However the is hope. Some of the leaders in preservation of internet art are not in fact art institutions, but libraries and internet archival projects, for whom collection, archiving and preservation is a routine matter. As more of their collections become digital, they have been actively addressing issues of storage, migration and emulation. This month we are joined by a panel of International experts from the archival field: Nancy McGovern, Digital Preservation Officer at Cornell University Library; Margaret Phillips, Paul Koerbin and Gerard Clifton from the PANDORA internet archive and PADI gateway at the National Library of Australia; Michele Kimpton of the Internet Archive with its consultant sage the WayBack Machine; Sharmin (Tinni) Choudhury, the software engineer for PANIC digital preservation project; Meta data standards expert Dr Simon Pockley from Deakin University; and Luciana Duranti (UBC), Yvette Hackett and Jim Suderman from InterPARES 2, Canada. We will also be joined by those concerned specifically with net art: Kevin McGarry from Rhizome Artbase, the worlds largest collection of networked media with over 1440 net.art works; and artist Graham Crawford, who curated two of Australia¹s earliest net art shows Tool 1 and Tool 2.0b which are no longer online. Our guests will discuss the tenuousness and a tenacity of networked histories and records, the critical distinction between object and events based archiving and what happens to an archive when funding disappears? Please join us at ­empyre- http://www.subtle.net/empyre in February for this critical discussion on archiving our online art history. Internet Archive and WayBack Machine: http://www.archive.org/ InterPARES 2 (IP2)- International Research on Permanent Authentic Records in Electronic Systems: http://www.interpares.org/welcome.cfm Preserving Access to Digital Information (PADI): http://www.nla.gov.au/padi/ PANDORA Australia's Web Archive: http://pandora.nla.gov.au/. PANIC - Preservation webservices Architecture for Newmedia and Interactive Collections: http://www.metadata.net/panic/ Rhizome ArtBase: http://rhizome.org/art Tool1 and Tool 2.0b are no longer online, however we are attempting to reconstruct them before the end of the month. Virtual Remote Control (VRC) at Cornell University: http://irisresearch.library.cornell.edu/VRC/index.html ============================== -empyre- is an arena for the discussion of media arts practice, and regularly invites practicioners, curators and theorists in the media arts field to discuss specific projects, publications, and issues. Subscribe to -empyre- at: http://www.subtle.net/empyre/