BENGAL FOUNDATION ARCHIVES
Physical Art and Digital Asset Management Units
As an arts and cultural organisation with 30 plus years of activity in fine art collection, exhibition organisation, and gallery management, as well as hosting musical, literary, and cultural events in equal measure, it is beholden to the ownership of medium-to-large collections of art, artifacts, publications, audiovisual holdings and records/data of both physical and digital nature.
In the last few decades, environmental, commercial, technological and socio-political change has altered Bangladesh’s local context, creating the need for the elimination of accumulations of legacy methodologies, processes and systems, and the creation of new systems of continuity from the past to the present, and towards the future.
With that in mind, the projects and operations of the Bengal Foundation Art Archives Dept. and Audiovisual Archives units are responsible for:
- The best-effort preservation management and digitisation of the collections of art, artifacts, data and media.
- The deployment and administration of software-based management systems on data storage servers, intended to meet the organisational needs of access, accountability and distribution of records and digital masters.
Underpinning the successful achievement of the mentioned objectives, is the awareness of the history and concurrent changes in the worlds in which Bengal Foundation operates. Competence and awareness, if not mastery, of the terminology, tools, techniques, physical materials and equipment used in spheres of fine art, graphics, photography, audio, video, electronics, events, publication, music, film, television and most importantly, science and information technology, is required.
The Art Archive Unit is the owner of the Art Digitisation Studio and has successfully produced consolidated primary inventories and enacted digitisation programmes for the Bengal Foundation and Abul Khair Collections. Standards and systems have been established for handling, physical storage, registry and environmental control. It has custodianship over the art storage premises, as well as providing total art digitisation support for all exhibitions and other intents, since its inception.
The Audiovisual Archives Unit, is owner of the AV digitisation stations for photography, video and audio; and of the Foundation’s Data Storage Server Infrastructure. It oversees the central data repositories for most major internal departments at the Foundation and has thus far consolidated the AV publication inventories, historical and concurrent AV digital masters. It is in the process of consolidating the entire holdings of Design, AV, Print Publication, Music Distribution and archives of Bengal Foundation and its affiliates, which is estimated to completed by 2024. This will be followed by the consolidation of the photography holdings and final archiving with a view to open the archives for the public, which may require a further 3 years to complete.