About This Webinar

Overview

In a car park storage unit located in the Valby neighborhood of Copenhagen, Denmark 2,000 architectural models had been stored for up to a decade by the Bjarke Ingels Group (BIG), an architectural firm headquartered just down the street. Amidst fluctuating temperatures and humidity levels, a couple water situations, and a lack of professional management, the 2-person BIG Archives team embarked on a comprehensive appraisal and processing project. Prior to 2023, the project started and stopped as Julie May was able to visit Copenhagen for a couple weeks at a time. It wasn’t until she moved there that she was able to fully plan out an escape route with the collaboration of Rita Fernandes, Assistant Archivist, and temporary workers throughout a focused one-and-a-half-year period.

This webinar will share the highs and lows of consolidating four storage units down to one, moving models from one office to another within a building construction schedule, mitigating significant logistical challenges from an inaccessible storage unit, and recording robust metadata to manage the inventory and decision-making process with full transparency for the design partners. The team utilized a combination of AirTable and the digital asset management system, OpenAsset, to visualize, synthesize, and share item-level and collection level model information such as the storage costs, physical condition, and archival value. These platforms allowed the team to create an effective workflow for appraisal, a mechanism for collecting structured metadata, and a tool to make retention decisions with contributions from stakeholders who are visually inclined rather than data-inclined. With the intellectual part of the project under control, the team could also manage the physical limitation of the storage space and its location to arrange an orderly and cost-effective transition to an appropriate location.

The objective of this session is to share how the small team turned chaotic disorder into a comprehensible schedule of disposal, appraisal, discovery, and orderly deposit into climate-controlled storage that continues to serve appraisal practices one year beyond the culmination of the processing project. The workflow is scalable and applicable to small and large collections, regardless of medium, and utilizing skilled and unskilled participants.

PresenterS

Rita Fernandes Archives & Digital Asset Management Coordinator, Bjarke Ingels Group Rita Fernandes is an architect and archivist from Portugal. She is the Archives & Digital Asset Management Coordinator based in Copenhagen, Denmark since 2023.

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