Background: the digital dance project

The New York Public Library's Jerome Robbins Dance Division has received a major grant from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Scholarly Communications Program for a Needs Analysis that will guide the future documentation and usage of the Library's extensive dance collection.

The Dance Division is the world's largest archive devoted to the history and documentation of dance. Each year, the Dance Division is visited by more than 24,000 performing artists, critics, scholars, writers, historians, and many others. Each year, the Division adds to this archive by creating original documentation through the recording of more than 100 works in addition to receiving gifts from dancers, writers and organizations of hundreds more. Significant uses have already been made of this archive, and dance documentation options continue to expand beyond film and video to include new media formats such as high definition and digital moving images.

The Needs Analysis at this juncture is to ensure long term preservation of dance heritage and to inform development work, so that access to materials, now and in the future, is both broad and of the best possible quality. For the Library, this study will define the existing and future needs more specifically than the Library has done before, and will define future users from a broader user perspective than ever before. By having experts articulate the needs, a case can be made and goals set to enlist participation and access beyond previous assessments.

The methodology for the investigation centers on the convening of six Working Groups to consider a number of major topics that work to-date has identified as critical to the process, and to formulate possible paths of action for the Library. The topics are:

1. The purposes of dance preservation and access
2. The nature of the artifact and intentions for use
3. Future uses and users of dance heritage material (especially in digital formats)
4. Digital standards: current best practices and future policies
5. Rights issues
6. Trusted repositories for digital dance material: capacity and collaboration

Invitees for the Working Groups comprised a selection of leading experts from the arts and culture and the field of dance, and from the fields outside the arts and culture related to the above topics. Each Working Group will met for two separate full-day meetings, and was be charged to look deeply and critically at its topic from a variety of perspectives, with the aid of initial planning work completed by the Library's planning consultants at Emc.Arts, and against a background of relevant materials from the field. A final convening will bring the project learning together and present findings & plans for the future to the dance field.