[game_preservation] Long-Term Storage

[Jerome McDonough]

On Jul 1, 2008, at 1:54 PM, Captain Commando wrote:


> Thanks, Jeremy, for all your insightful points. On the question of  

> 'why' isn't this supposed to be the primary issue addressed in the  

> 2008 Whitepaper?


Yes, but I'm thinking of a little smaller set of 'whys,' rather than  
a big 'Why', and I think this gets to some of the issues your'e  
thinking about with respect to context.  If I'm preserving a game to  
inform scholars in the future about the programming techniques used  
by the late 20th century gaming industry, it implies a fair different  
emphasis on what I'd collect and attempt to preserve than if I'm  
trying to inform scholars about the emergent community practices of  
MMORPGs.  Both of these would situations would also differ somewhat  
from what I might try to collect and preserve if all I want to do is  
ensure on-going access to working copies of the games.

It's one of the truisms of the preservation world that preservation  
without access is pointless, but we need to have discussions of the  
various reasons people will want to access this content in the future  
(or at least some reasonable guesses on our part) to help plan out  
collecting activities.


> Also, regarding digital tape, you think this is good to use in  

> conjunction with hard drives? And should multiple tapes be used?

>


Well, for smaller computing environments, tape's good for backup;  
cheap, easy to replicate, easy to ship copies off site.  But for  
larger data stores focused on preservation, I think the driving  
factors are going to be speed of access (I don't want to have to  
migrate a petabyte of data that's on tape) and the ability to detect  
when something's wrong (the computer can tell me when a drive has  
gone belly up and needs a replacement, but it can't tell me anything  
about a tape on the shelf).  The big data centers these days aren't  
bothering with a lot of tape, you'll notice.


Jerome McDonough, Asst. Professor
Graduate School of Library & Information Science
University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign
501 E. Daniel Street, Room 202
Champaign, IL 61820
(217) 244-5916
jmcdonou at uiuc.edu