CHArt TWENTY-THIRD ANNUAL CONFERENCE
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Digital Archive Fever
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Sarah Parsons, York University, Toronto, Canada
From Information to Knowledge: An Unfinished Canadian Case Study
For the last ten years, the online Canadian Centre for Contemporary Art (www.ccca.ca) has assembled a growing collection of previously inaccessible or hard-to-find quality information on Canadian art and on a broad range of artists working in Canada. Placing the resource on the Internet has made it available to a diverse group of users in Canada, serving the art community as a whole by drawing together and meeting the needs of both content drivers/providers (artists) and users (teachers, students, researchers, curators, writers, collectors and the general public). In that sense, the CCCA has become a technological interface for the Canadian art community. Although the project has received significant government grant support through digital initiatives and arts councils, it was a community, not a government initiative.
This paper will explore the CCCA as a new kind of cultural resource, one that seeks a community managed balance between ’top-down‘ and ’bottom-up‘ access to cultural resources. The Canadian art community has not traditionally been understood as a cohesive entity. Fractured by cultural and linguistic differences, geography, profession, and by market niches, its shared needs and goals have never been well understood or served. However, art teachers, curators, artists, collectors, writers, and researchers all have a vested interest in a centre for the documentation of and research on Canadian visual culture. They require access to images, biographical information, interviews, archival finding aids and critical writings. The core information they need does not differ dramatically but how they turn that information into knowledge does. This paper will probe that process and suggest possible future directions for foregrounding and enhancing the move from information to knowledge through the CCCA, such as user portals. I will also consider the broader international implications of this effort to reify and serve an art community through a new model of cultural access.