The Alliance for Media Arts & Culture

The Open Archives Initiative -
Featured at SXSW, In Partnership with The MacArthur Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts

Concept, Creative Ideation, Strategy, International Panel, Symposium and Final Report Production

“Sincere thanks to Jocelyn Arem, lead researcher and facilitator of the Alliance Open Archive Initiative and author of the Gathering Wisdom report. Because of her dedication to and shepherding of this project, we have become a more enlightened, co-creative community and discovered how much more we have to learn.”
— Wendy Levy, Director of the Alliance for Media Arts + Culture

The Ask

Independent media organizations around the world may reflect the diverse cultural identity of communities, but they may also be rendered invisible because the content and stories generated are not being preserved, let alone shared openly. And we live in a world where open sharing of content may result in harm to the artists, producers and journalists who create the work, and well as the subjects who inhabit the stories. Despite advances in technology, media/culture archives are deteriorating at a rapid rate and stories are being lost forever. We felt an urgent need to collaboratively address this issue as a field, to find a collective voice, and to strategize emerging and best practices for creating impactful community-based preservation and access solutions.

Our Deliverables

The Alliance Open Archive Initiative brings together a group of cultural preservation and storytelling experts with independent, institutional and community-based content creators to collect and synthesize highly accessible, collaborative strategies that address three urgent core questions in the field today:

  • WHO is telling and preserving the stories?

  • HOW are organizations and artists addressing the challenge of getting their material preserved and making it accessible, usable, continuous and transformative?

  • WHAT can organizations and artists do to keep pace with emerging and best practices of preserving and opening their digital archives?

Thanks to a generous grant from The MacArthur Foundation and additional funding from the National Endowment for the Arts CARES program, the Alliance for Media Arts + Culture launched the Open Archive Initiative in January 2020 to investigate best and emerging practices for creating and sustaining open archives that disrupt corporate ownership, center collective authorship and indigenous rights, and insure access for future generations.

We brought together a group of international digital archivists, cultural preservation and storytelling experts with independent and community-based content creators and technologists to gather and synthesize collective wisdom. We invited three US-based Fellows from this international group to work with us during the summer of 2020, going deeper into emerging themes and helping us think strategically about the ramifications of integrating ethical technology into platform solutions. This report, and our subsequent presentation at SXSW synthesizes the first year of work of the Open Archive initiative; we intend to action these findings in the coming years as part of a buoyant, systemic solution to cultural erasure and inequality.