Project Description: 661 Art Museum is a fictional museum that has commissioned artists and collectives to create new net art for their website for the past ten years. With their collection of 55 and growing commissioned net artworks, 661 now seeks to standardize their approach to organizing, maintaining, and storing both the artworks themselves and their related documentation. The project team spent a month drafting an integrated management plan in ensuring the storage and documentation of their net artworks are uniform and in line with industry standards. This proposal can allow 661 Art Museum to be better positioned not only to onboard future commissions but also to facilitate ease of administrative access and research requests as well.

Methods: For the Museum to address their goals in managing their net art commissions, we have identified the following objectives: 1. Create a numbering scheme for the net artworks that align with the museum's existing numbering conventions, 2. Identify appropriate metadata in TMS and develop a vocabulary guide to effectively capture the net artworks, 3. Create database entries for each net artwork, and 4. Identify digital and physical storage necessities for the works. To draft appropriate solutions, we interviewed the Permanent Documentation Manager – Majida Mugherbel at the Whitney Museum's Research Resources Department and researched reliable online resources such as Wikidata, Union List of Artist Names Online (ULAN), Categories for the Description of Works of Art (CDWA), Art & Architecture Thesaurus (AAT). The final management plan we created includes the methodologies of the four objectives we identified, staff & supplies required for the execution of the plan, and the timeline for completion.

My Role: This project was completed as the final assignment for the INFO-661 Art Documentation course. This was a group project involving five other students. All six students in the group made the concept map and polished the metadata field crosswalk together. The rest of the work was divided. I mainly focused on filling out the fields of 661 Field Description, Examples, Vocabulary Control, and 661 Internal Vocab Description in the Metadata Field Crosswalk spreadsheet. Also, taking references from the current content standard used by the Whitney Museum, I drafted the numbering scheme and TMS data entry rules for the net art commissioned by 661 Art Museum.

Learning Outcome Achieved: Professionalism

Rationale: This project demonstrates my in-depth understanding of the technical challenges, ethical standards, and practical concerns that impact the museum profession in the field of net art collection management. It also reflects my ability to compose a comprehensive proposal with all fundamental elements including objectives, problems addressed, methodology, assessment, and budget.