Just a Phase We're Going Through

Performing Arts Resources is an occasional publication making reference material and research findings available to scholars, curators, and the staff of performing arts and general readership libraries. In this instance the publication followed presentations made at a Theatre Library Association Symposium (October 10th, 2003, New York Public Library for the Performing Arts) at the Lincoln Center, New York. My presentation entitled Just A Trace, see http://tla.library.unt.edu/smithabstract.htm - was on current holdings and Web access arrangements to the Live Art and Digital Performance Archives (somewhat inaccurately recalled in the Editor's Introduction as evocative filmed documentation of the wild avant garde performance scene in London p. xi). The article recalled some of the practical and technical problems of preservation of data prevalent at that time and outlined the particular collections then being collated into national collections (The Digital Performance Archive and The Live Art Archive – see Output 1 above - together with the acquisition by donation in 1998 of the entire video collection of the National Review of Live Art, 1986-present) currently (2006-08) being digitised under an AHRC Resource Enhancement Funded Project. The article ended by distinguishing between accessibility and preservation of data, asking the questions that were eventually to be answered by the digitisation process.