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**WORKSHOP: CONSERVING AND ARCHIVING EPHEMERAL ARTWORKS 2-5.30pm June 25th 2008 Live Art Archives Department of Drama: Theatre, Film, Television University of Bristol** Partly drawing on the constructive conversations that were initiated at last summer's AHDS Performing Arts Summer School, 'Digital Representations of Performing Arts', we would like to propose hosting an event here. Meeting will enable networking and knowledge exchange between related performance archiving projects, specifically focused around pragmatic concerns, a sharing of practical methodologies for conserving ephemeral performance works and making their documents accessible. We hope to share experience of and approaches to: preserving and restoring carrier tapes/the audio-visual documents; digitising and data storage; producing access copies for users; developing appropriate systems of metadata; intellectual property rights issues; making catalogues, databases or digital archives accessible online. We would like to invite you to propose brief presentations of projects, to share your approaches to the conservation or archiving of ephemeral/time-based works and their documents, and to raise any questions, issues or difficulties that have emerged for you. We will then workshop these issues, facilitating the exchange of skills/technical information and exemplary models, to both learn from each others' projects and recognise differences in their objectives. We will also offer a tour of the Live Art Archives here, and of the Digitisation Project. We will be in email dialogue prior to the event, so you can feed-in any pressing questions for us to workshop and ideas for what you would like to get out of the meeting. This event will be held on the afternoon of June 25th. There has also been some discussion of inviting a couple of artists or curators, whose practices interrogate archival systems or processes of audio-visual conservation (or deterioration), who might intervene critically and contribute productively to the afternoon's proceedings. Are there artists you have come across through your projects who you would recommend contacting, who would both benefit from the content of such an event, and offer the perspective of someone whose work has been preserved for the future in an innovative way, or who appropriates the approaches of archivists in their practice. Do you feel such a dialogue would be productive alongside the technical focus of the afternoon? It is hoped that detailed discussion, of the fragility of recordings and methodologies to preserve tapes from disappearance, will also raise theoretical questions around the distinction between archival objects and performance events. Likewise we hope to touch on future innovations in terms of the production and use of developing digital resources, e.g. in terms of user-generated documentation, taxonomies, patterns of knowledge formation and organisation. There is only a small amount of funding available for this event, so we are hoping that it will be possible for the majority of participants to fund their own attendance from their projects or application to their institution. Let us know if you would need travel/accommodation expenses as we may be able to cover these is some circumstances. Contact Paul Clarke if you are interested in attending.