It’s not perfect, but it’s an improvement. Rhizome.org is down right now as they update the site to take into account the new membership policy. But the new director, Lauren Cornell, posted the plan for the new policy to the email list this morning. Here’s the summary:

Under our new policy, anyone, regardless of whether they have donated to Rhizome or not, will be able to post or access Rhizome content from the last year simply by signing up. It’s completely free to sign up - all you have to do is register an email address and password.

Artworks and texts that are *more than one year old* will reside in the Rhizome Archives. Only Rhizome Members will be able to access the Archives. Members will also be able to maintain a Member Page in the Community Directory, create Member-Curated Exhibits, and use special features such as Advanced Search. In the coming months, we will roll out innovative features to keep our membership program dynamic and worthwhile.

All current Members will retain their membership status under the new policy. When your membership expires, you will still be able to subscribe to Rhizome lists and browse the site. But, in order to retain member benefits, you will be asked to renew your membership at an annual level of $25. I hope you will consider continuing your membership at this level. Rhizome is just as reliant on our base of Members for financial support now as ever before.

It’s not clear if things fall into the archive automatically after they are a year old or if everything added before May 23, 2004 goes into the archive and everything after is out. I assume the former. So there will be a moving archive deadline I’m assuming.

I was pro-fee when it was proposed, but later changed my mind and became anti-fee. At first I felt that if Rhizome needed the money, then a Rhizome behind a fee firewall is better than no Rhizome at all. But then I realized that the firewall was slowly strangling Rhizome and urged them to ditch it. Which they’ve now done. Good!

A small bit of criticism: I don’t like the archive idea. It’s my opinion that the text and art archives should be open forever. Rhizome needs to figure out other services/features that people will pay a membership fee for, but they shouldn’t restrict access to the artbase or text archives.

Putting my criticism aside, I’ll say congrats to all the Rhizome staff for getting the new policy in place. I’m sure it was a lot of work. And now that we’ve got a fairly substantial hole in the firewall, perhaps we can tear it down entirely someday :-) permanent link to this post