[game_preservation] Cataloging Standards?

[Andrew Armstrong]

Standards, "Best Practices" or "How to start to preserve digital games" 
was going to be the focus of a second white paper (and perhaps 
associated set of standards done by the SIG), as noted in the first 
white paper at the end. Maybe this will get started next year sometime.

This was definitely going to be waited on until at least Henry Lowood 
had finished the work on the MMO preservation and how he catalogued 
that, so it could be used as an example, baseline or standard itself. 
More examples are very much necessary - any standards are by definition 
used by people because it is useful to them to use :)

You can check some past discussions from when Henry put up a bag of DOOM 
material very relevant to this - didn't contain all the sort of 
database/metadata info, but did contain what might be considered a good 
collection of information to explain what DOOM was and is.

I think if you want to start putting up how you did your own standards, 
and propose some - well, I highly encourage you to start something on 
the wiki (messages here get lost or forgotten, I should know, I forget a 
ton!) - I can create a relevant page if you want a start at it. Noting 
something down to at least reference later saves us finding this 
discussion in several months time, and also shows that "Yes, we're 
looking at it by having people who actually do this put examples up" :)

Basically, why haven't we got a project already for this? It's honestly 
just never really been discussed much. The physical archives all use 
their own cataloguing (likely as not including custom fields to collate 
groups of items) depending on their library system, archive system, 
software they're using and so forth. Digital archives - well, there are 
not many I know of, to be honest (on-line only ones tend to just have 
big randomish databases). There might be some cross-archive discussion 
already, likely so on the non-game side at least. Collections and 
specific archives of course won't follow trends from anywhere - thus 
your example.

I'm highly interested in this too, having some common ground on 
searchable metadata fields would mean the world for researching the 
history of games - certainly I'd love to see a collaborative database of 
items that is searchable on-line for this kind of purpose since the 
regional space between locations is so huge.

Andrew