To ensure both the long-term life, and integrity, of your work, you should make yourself aware of the basic problems associated with the medium you're working with. It is important also to consider the other broader issues of moving image preservation. This page begins to introduce some of the factors you should be considering and also some information about the moves made by the larger gallery and archive community dealing with many of the same problems.

Points for consideration
Without as yet getting too format specific, the list below details the basic but important actions and considerations that you should be thinking about.

- Film and video can be damaged by the circumstances in which they are stored. Heat and humidity both cause deterioration and constant variation in these environmental factors could be disastrous. You need to find a contained storage space, whether in the home or a gallery or another place altogether, away from windows, heaters, chemicals, and drafts. Look carefully at the characteristics of the format you are going to store.

- If your piece isn’t stored in a purposes built environment it would be advisable to keep one copy in a different location. This acts as a form of insurance copy in case of any accidents.

- Think about the equipment you need to view and look after your work. It may be that their preservation needs addressing too.

- How do want your work to be seen? Does the format that it was originally made on, inform on the integrity of the piece? You may want to make viewing copies or transfer between formats.

- When you make your work it is important to think carefully about the issues addressed above, and to document them too. The decisions and documentation section here outlines precise questions you need to ask yourself which, particularly in the case of video, can vitally effect the future preservation and viewing experience of your work.

Gallery Strategies
Internationally, the awareness of the lack of standards and the moves to address the problems of preserving artist's moving image work is gathering pace. In 1999 the Tate gallery worked with the Foundation for the Conservation of Modern Art, in Amsterdam, to establish the INCCA, the International Network for the Conservation of Contemporary Art.

Their website at gives an outline of their intent and work, in addition to a great deal of information at www.incca.org.

The site states that they aim to 'collect, share and preserve knowledge needed for the conservation of modern and contemporary art.' The site is easy to navigate but most of the actual content is held up in individual essays. Unfortunately their 'Database for Artists Archives' is only available to members of the network. Many of the specific conservators working at the institutions represented in INCCA regularly contribute to contemporary art and moving image archive panels on the very subject of video art preservation.

Amsterdam's Foundation for the Conservation of Modern Art has also established 'Project Preservation Video Art'. This is a collaborative project that pools the informational resources of numerous Dutch galleries and video art collections, and transfers older vide work to stable contemporary video formats whilst, where possible, working closely with the original artists.

INCCA's eleven partners also include the New York Guggenheim Museum. With the Daniel Langlois Foundation, the Guggenheim formulated the information resource the Variable Media Network. See http://www.variablemedia.net/e/welcome.html.

This web site demonstrates a very clear-headed approach to preserving artist moving image work. The Variable Media Network identifies different preservation strategies, each one reflecting the issues that are addressed above. These can be found under the strategies terms section of the homepage and pursue, in different ways, the integrity and intentionality of the artists work.

The New York based Independent Media Arts Preservation (IMAP) draws on over forty institutions and provides advice and guidelines for time-based media artists. See http://www.imappreserve.org/about/index.html

All these groups whilst looking to unify approaches to preservation, also place great emphasis on the decisions made by the artist. That these decisions should be so important reflects the regard for the work as an individual art object. This attitude is not always mirrored in the acquisition policies adopted by the more general moving image archives.

The resources section of this site lists the regional and national moving image archives and gives details of their policies towards artist work.