LI-MA’s library brings together a growing collection of publications by artists, collaborators, and scholars working across media art and digital culture. Through this series, we occasionally highlight titles from the shelves that continue to inform, question, and expand these discussions. This time, it's How to Archive Your Digital Art & Culture by Gaby Wijers. If you make, collect or care about digital work, this one is worth your time.
Born-digital art lives through its technical systems, and it erodes as those systems fall apart, surviving as fragments of expired dependencies, incompatible formats and missing documentation.
Gaby Wijers, director of LI-MA, put this together as the fifth cahier in the NADD 'How to Archive Better' series. This workbook is meant to be scribbled in, dog-eared, and used. Inside, those slippery terms (archiving, preservation, conservation, documentation) finally make sense. Wijers names the three invisible enemies lurking in every digital file, then lays out five steps to keep your work alive and valuable, all drawn from real LI-MA conservation case studies.
The takeaway: redundancy keeps your files safe, but preservation gives them meaning.
If your own archive is giving you trouble, reach out. That’s what we’re here for.
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