New Museum Digital Archive

The New Museum is Manhattan’s only contemporary art museum actively working with living artists. The museum has been hosting art lovers since 1977.

The New Museum Digital Archive contains more than 10,000 objects (images, videos, sounds) covering the Museum’s forty years of existence. The works that previously only hung on the walls of the museum are now there for anyone with an internet connection to see, hear, watch and interact with. This is a searchable online media database of more than 5,500 artists, curators and organizations that have enriched the history of the institution over decades. If you want to browse this archive, the link below will help you:

I hope that the number of such archives will increase. Compared to the physical archive, digital archives have many benefits. Digitizing archives has both internal and external advantages.

I can list these benefits as follows:

- Timelessness: New and existing visitors can always access the works from the comfort of their own homes.

- Space saving: In the physical archive, very little space is sufficient in the digital archive instead of the dozens of rooms required to store the works.

- Using sensitive documents: It provides the ability to create online-only exhibitions using objects that would normally be too sensitive to handle.This also applies to historical documents and books. Documents written on old paper are less durable than today’s papers. A detailed demonstration is not possible under physical archive conditions. This document can be digitized and zoomed.

-Large audience: This type of archive allows the works to be shared with a wider audience around the world.

Speaking for museums,the artifacts become accessible to people who would never have imagined entering the museum itself.

- Immortality: Artifacts become eternal through digital archives. It is protected from natural disasters, fires and other destructive means.

- Easier documentation and cataloging: Such archives make cataloging and documentation easier. Artifacts can be more easily classified.

Sound curator Richard McDonough puts it this way: “ “Rather than having to dig out a cassette or draw an archive from an open reel, archives are now easier to transfer into a user-friendly format.”

Originally published at https://istinyenewmedia.wixsite.com on November 10, 2020.