Whitney Museum of American Art

Through its Media Preservation Initiative, the Whitney Museum of American Art confronted the fragility of time-based media artworks that had entered the collection on unstable consumer media — notably USB flash drives prone to silent corruption. Replacing scattered hard-drive storage, the museum built an end-to-end pipeline: forensic transfer and checksum verification, then ingest into Archivematica for format normalisation and METS/PREMIS packaging. The preservation back end was integrated with the ResourceSpace digital-asset-management system and drew descriptive metadata from the museum's TMS catalogue, so curators gain immediate access proxies while master files sit safely in preservation storage. A clear US art-museum model for audiovisual preservation.