[game_preservation] Long-Term Storage

[Henry Lowood]

<... ears itching, wakes up ..., "somebody must be talking about me.">

I'll just add that with current models for software preservation, the 
"wrapper information" requires a lot of contextual research about the 
making and distribution of a software title. The bits by themselves 
will be very difficult to do anything with otherwise.  In the project 
with Library of Congress, it's interesting how much research about 
the systems used for distributing and running a piece of software we 
have to do for each software title under consideration. That's a 
layer in-between the contextual materials and the software itself, 
but of course it touches both kinds of documentation.

Another consideration is that software preservation is fairly 
resource-intensive (in terms of long-term preservation models, I'm 
not talking about emulation alone) while a lot can be done with 
limited resources to create and preserve related documentation -- 
documents, interviews, pages like the Memorial sites, etc.   I'm 
thinking a lot lately about what I have begun calling the battleships 
and pt-boats model.  The battleships are the big institutional 
repositories -- they take a long while to get moving but once moving 
can deploy significant resources; pt-boats are individual 
researchers, hobbyists, curators with collecting passions -- nimble, 
quick, and able to reach places that are inaccessible to 
battleships.  Battleships can easily miss targets because they can't 
turn in time (there is a historical case I can cite by the way: the 
Yamato at the Battle of the Leyte Gulf). So far, game preservation 
has been dominated by pt-boats and it is likely to stay that way for 
some time; however, a few battleships are beginning to load some 
ammunition and stores.  Ideal case: the admirals at the major 
repositories start talking to the pt-boat captains in player 
communities and groups like this one. Anyway, that's one of our goals 
for the Library of Congress project.

Henry





At 11:23 AM 6/30/2008, Simon Carless wrote:

>I think a far more important question is - what are we preserving 

>and how are we preserving it? I already started using the Internet 

>Archive's data systems (which are fairly robust, and which I'm sure 

>we could use for legal projects) for the CLASP project, which is now on hiatus.

>

>But the issue was - it's just no fun and a tremendous amount of work 

>'dark archiving' classic games into sealed vaults for 75 years 

>(until copyright runs out - potentially longer!), especially when 

>there's no real ability to display them anywhere.

>

>As Henry Lowood has remarked before a few times on here - it's 

>probably the participatory history (interviewing creators) and 

>physical ephemera around the making of the game that is as - or more 

>- important than the finished product itself, which I have a strong 

>reason to believe will be preserved by hobbyists and fans - in 

>digital/emulated form, quite often - far beyond any organized or 

>centralized attempt to do so.

>

>My 2c,

>Simon.

>

>On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 11:15 AM, Andrew Armstrong 

><<mailto:andrew at aarmstrong.org>andrew at aarmstrong.org> wrote:

>Jim Leonard wrote:

>I work with these technologies as part of my Day Job(tm) so I can 

>offer some insight, but it is that same Day Job(tm) that has 

>preventing me from commenting thus far.  I'll try to do so tonight.

>

>Cool, thanks Jim! :-D

>

>I've been thinking and I'll probably look into contacting some UK 

>archives, if anything relevant even exists, over summer. I'm sure 

>USA versions are much bigger in any case, but it'd be interesting to 

>visit one (and if information could be gleamed it's always worth 

>putting it in the SIG's wiki of course). I'm sure they're all 

>different, but there is bound to be a lot of common ground, and it 

>might also help future whitepaper work if any guidelines were set 

>down on how to archive.

>

>

>Andrew

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Henry Lowood, Ph.D.
Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections;
  Film & Media Collections
HRG, Green Library, 557 Escondido Mall
Stanford University Libraries
Stanford CA 94305-6004
650-723-4602; lowood at stanford.edu; http://www.stanford.edu/~lowood 
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