Planning for the preservation of an installation work is best approached by breaking down the process into a series of steps, as described below. There is a logical progression to these steps--first determining the overall scope of the collection or project, documenting condition and establishing priorities, the remastering/migration itself, and the necessary followup steps that conclude the process.

The basic procedures outlined below can serve as a guide to the drafting of a preservation plan tailored to the needs of your project, and to your available resources. A preservation plan is an invaluable tool, not only for keeping a project organized, but also as a way of demonstrating to potential funding sources what your needs are, and what goals you intend to accomplish.

For more details on these procedures, see the Installation Best Practices section of this website.

Documentation

Inspection

Conservation

Preservation

Quality Control

Documentation

Documentation is the process of gathering and organizing information about a work, including its condition, its contents, and the actions taken to preserve it.

• An installation may consist of numerous elements and be composed of various materials other than electronic media. It is therefore crucial to document all the components of the work, including its behavior, as soon as it becomes part of a collection.
• Unique identifying numbers for each individual item are critical to the cataloging process. For an installation, it is useful to assign a unique number to the work as a whole and to assign a variation of that number to each component.

Inspection

Inspection is the process of gathering detailed information about tape or file condition, in preparation for migration to new formats, as well as to check the status of works already preserved or yet to be preserved.

• A detailed physical inspection of the installation and its materials can provide a great deal of information about the work and can help the archivist, conservator, and vendor determine what steps are necessary to migrate the media components to a new format.

Conservation

Unlike other works of media art, installation art is intricate, and its conservation involves the preservation of multiple components. These components are typically comprised of the sound and/or visual media, display equipment, sculptural elements, and any behavior that is linked to the work's interactivity with the observer.

Preservation

Preservation refers to the overall process by which the content of an item is saved and its long-term viability is ensured.

• With respect to installation art, the preservation assessment of all distinct components that make up an installation artwork should be done concurrently in order to maintain, as best as possible, the authenticity of the original piece. Thorough documentation of the original will inform your preservation methodology and process.

Quality Control

Be prepared to invest a large amount time in the quality control process-perhaps even more time than the actual running time of the work.

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