Requirements Analysis for Creation of Personal Archives of Artists in Tehran

Personal Archiving is a branch of archival science and genealogy, focusing on the capture, classify, maintain, store, retrieve, use, archive, preservation, dispose, and management of an individual's personal documents and other documentary output, generally by the individuals concerned. A personal archive is an archive created by a person with personal goals, needs and interests. The lack of personal archives, especially for artists, can disperse their artworks throughout their lives, increasing the lack of coherence of their artworks and personal information. A personal archive is established through identifying, capturing, collecting, organizing, indexing, storing, integrating, retrieving, and sharing of personal works, documents and information. Personal archives are an important cultural heritage of a country, because they represent the cultural heritage of individuals and their individual, social, economic and cultural activities in the society. Therefore, the present research seeks to study the requirements for the creation of personal archives of artists in Tehran.

The statistical population of this study included 271 artists from the Institute for the Development of Visual Arts, in three fields of painting, sculpture and graphic art who has held at least two individual exhibitions. Participants were selected by snowball method and introduced by previous participants. The research method was mixed. First, the literature were analyzed and reviewed. Second, the interviews have been conducted. Third, the contents of interviews were analyzed descriptively and qualitatively, using thematic analysis and the MAXQDA software. Forth, the requirements for creating personal archives of artists were extracted. Finally, in the second phase, according to the requirements extracted from the interviews, a questionnaire was developed and was filled out by participants.

The result of chi-square test based on the degree of freedom of each factor showed that there was a significant relationship between the mentioned factors and the creation of the artists' personal archives. The mean of conservation factor was 3.679 with a factor loading 0.94, the mean of storage factor was 3.636 with a factor loading of 0.92, the mean of factor of acquisition (collecting) was 3.447 with a factor loading of 0.86, the mean of factor of retrieval and access was 3.17 with a factor loading of 0.81; and the mean of organization factor was 2.791 with a factor loading of 0.79.

The results of analysis of questionnaires' data revealed that the requirements and priorities to create personal archives for artists in order of importance include: conservation, storage, acquisition (collecting), retrieval, access, and organization. In analyzing these essentials, physical and digital protection of personal information as the underpinnings of the protection agent, is vital for the artists of Tehran. It is worth noting that protecting the physical archives is harder than protecting digital archives. It is suggested to create a database of artists' personal archives to allow them sharing their personal archives and experiences.