For museums and artists, preserving digitally created works of art creates problems when works are created with ephemeral technology with a life span of maybe a few months or years. It's quite easy to envision a future in which museums become repositories of not only important works of new media art, but also of all of the equipment required to preserve each piece of electronic art. Given the rate of technological change, a museum could collect hundreds of computers, thousands of versions of Web and other software, and still not be done. It could be argued that digital and online curators could be at least part of a solution. Not anytime terribly soon, says Jeff Gates, Head of New Media initiatives at the National Museum of American Art.
Curators currently get their strokes from publishing books.
It's in transition. We have to look at dangling carrots in front of people so that they see that this is something they want to do. One of the handful of examples of online curating is at the Beyond Interface site. Unfortunately, sites like this are rare. As the Web medium becomes more accepted as a pure art medium, it will be a matter of course for museums to include Web media in exhibitions.