AIC's 52nd Annual Meeting

The Heritage Conservation Centre (HCC) was founded in 2000 under the Singapore National Heritage Board (NHB) to serve as a repository and conservation facility for the management and preservation of Singapore’s National Collection. The collection is highly eclectic and comprises over 250.000 items ranging from traditional ancient artefacts to complex contemporary time-based media (TBM) installations. In the past twenty years, the TBM National Collection has increased exponentially and is currently counting more than 230 media works acquired primarily under the purview of two institutions, the National Gallery Singapore (NGS) and the Singapore Art Museum (SAM).

Several strategies to cater for the needs of the digital collection have been undertaken over the years. In 2019, HCC staff from collection management and conservation, joined together to create an informal TBM task force, which immediately started advocating for a backup server. In view of the limited resources and lack of specialised in-house expertise, the team initiated a conversation with local experts, with the aim of creating storage redundancy and sharing expertise across institutions. At the same time, the task force explored different options for digital preservation storage and performed an initial collection survey, which, even if incomplete, provided valuable insights into the makeup of the collection. Although these exercises did not provide immediate solace, they raised awareness of the gap between collection growth and the institutional limitations to care for media artworks. Based on these past efforts the urgency to develop the professional institutional capacity as well as establish tailored policies and workflows became visible to the upper management.

The window of opportunity to speed up the quest to hire specialized staff arrived with the designing of the new Our Singapore Heritage Plan 2.0, a 5 years-long master plan to shape the next chapter of the nation’s heritage and museum landscape. In view of the board's decision to foster the acquisition of contemporary design and thanks to the result of the previous assessments, the positions of TBM conservator and digitalization manager were opened. Currently, the newly established cross-departmental TBM Working Group has launched a multi-phase preservation plan focused on conceptualizing institutional goals, implementing a risk assessment of the collection, and vetting new policies to organically sustain the long-term care of the expanding media collection.

With this talk, we aim to share our experiences and the pivots we have made while embracing the challenges that digital preservation poses. It is hoped that by sharing HCC's ongoing journey we could offer a pathway to other regional institutions in South East Asia that are facing the pressing issue of caring for their digital collection.