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<font size=3><... ears itching, wakes up ..., "somebody must be
talking about me."><br><br>
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. <br><br>
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.<br><br>
Henry<br><br>
<br><br>
<br><br>
At 11:23 AM 6/30/2008, Simon Carless wrote:<br>
<blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
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.<br><br>
My 2c,<br>
Simon.<br><br>
On Mon, Jun 30, 2008 at 11:15 AM, Andrew Armstrong
<<a href="mailto:andrew@aarmstrong.org">andrew@aarmstrong.org</a>>
wrote:<br>
</font>
<dl>
<dd>Jim Leonard wrote:<br>
<dl>
<dd>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.<br><br>
</dl>
<dd>Cool, thanks Jim! :-D<br><br>
<dd>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.<br><br>
<br>
<dd>Andrew<br>
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<x-sigsep><p></x-sigsep>
Henry Lowood, Ph.D.<br>
Curator for History of Science & Technology Collections;<br>
Film & Media Collections<br>
HRG, Green Library, 557 Escondido Mall<br>
Stanford University Libraries<br>
Stanford CA 94305-6004<br>
650-723-4602; lowood@stanford.edu;
<a href="http://www.stanford.edu/~lowood" eudora="autourl">
http://www.stanford.edu/~lowood</a></body>
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