Artmob at the ACA Conference

This poster will showcase the Artmob Content Management System (CMS), an open source digital archive and collection building tool developed at York University. Artmob's goal is to build large, accessible online archives of publicly licensed Canadian artistic material, and to foreground the issues that this process raises for Canadian copyright law and cultural policy. We will illustrate the implementation of the software for several archives, including poets bpNichol and Fred Wah, The Scream Literary Festival, and VideoCabaret theatre ensemble.

The Artmob CMS speaks directly to the general conference theme of "Rights, Responsibilities, Trust." The research project is driven by a belief that: Canadians have a right to digitally access publicly funded cultural projects; cultural institutions have a responsibility to make their materials available to scholars, researchers, and the general public; and the successful creation of digital archives requires a foundation of trust between rights holders, the public, funding institutions, and libraries, archives and museums.

The Artmob CMS draws on social networking techniques to enrich contextual information of presented materials. It facilitates a dialogue between creators, archivists and the general public in the shared responsibility of selection, arrangement and description of materials. This dialogic framework invites the creation of user-driven temporary exhibits and may ameliorate some of the risks for archivists in posting orphaned or partially cleared works online. As a low cost solution developed in a spirit of collaboration and with shared cultural responsibility in mind, Artmob CMS is viable amidst a host of financial, social, and legal pressures.