This paper examines the issues inherent to documenting integral characteristics of variable media artworks. The author begins by revisiting Suzanne Briet's vision of documentation as a socially constructed practice central to the creation and dissemination of knowledge. This perspective lends insight into the nature of the document in the digital age and suggests a new cultural technique for working with variable media art as both document and documented. Janet Cardiff's 40 Part Motet (2001) provides case material for this discussion, and Richard Rinehart's proposal of the score as a documentary medium is suggested as a means of capturing the elements of practice and performance associated with variable media.

How can an open access publishing and distribution model benefit research in contemporary art? In 2013 Artexte, a non-profit organization dedicated to documenting contemporary art in Canada, launched the e-artexte open access digital repository to offer self-archiving services to publishers, authors and artists in Canadian contemporary art. Although the fine arts community has generally been slow to adopt open access, Canadian contemporary arts publishers, many of whom have small budgets and limited resources, are finding the open access e-artexte repository an effective means of increasing distribution of and access to their publications.

Le présent document décrit les diverses approches en matière de normes et d’organisation des connaissances qui ont été préconisées historiquement par les bibliothèques et les musées afin de gérer et de donner accès à leurs ressources, de même que l’incidence de ces pratiques pour répondre aux besoins et attentes des utilisateurs dans un environnement réseauté. En raison des caractéristiques particulières à l’information culturelle patrimoniale, les musées ont été moins portés à adopter des normes en matière de gestion de ressources que ne l’ont été les bibliothèques et, en conséquence, ils ont été moins bien préparés à tirer profit des perspectives qu’offre le paysage changeant de l’information. Pour devenir des participants actifs dans les communautés réseautées qui se forment présentement, les musées devront effectuer un virage quant à l’utilisation des normes et à l’organisation des connaissances au sein de leur propre communauté.

Purpose: The following research questions structured our analysis: Does an open access institutional repository model respond to the needs of a non-academic documentation centre? Is EPrints software a good match to support the needs of the existing metadata describing Artexte's collection? What are the customizations required to accommodate existing Artexte metadata using EPrints? Methods: We exported the existing metadata schema and sample data in Artexte's three databases, performed a manual evaluation of metadata quality and compared the 49 Artexte fields to those available within the EPrints schema.Results: We identify the metadata elements that mapped by default without the need for customization or modification and those which would need to be added to EPrints using configuration files. We also identify the custom software development to accommodate Artexte metadata using EPrints: the bilingual controlled vocabulary demands an extension of the EPrints subject taxonomy model with thesaurus semantic relationships.Conclusions: Comparing Artexte and EPrints metadata schemas, we found that 15 out of 49 fields mapped by default without need for modification, 25 fields would need to be added to EPrints configuration files and 1 field will be removed during the migration. With only 8 fields requiring some special attention, we conclude that EPrints is suitable to the needs of Artexte's bibliographic data management.

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