[game_preservation] Cataloging Standards?

[Andrew Armstrong]

With that being the case, standard archive and library systems can 
easily do "(Game) Name(s)" "Date" "Publisher" "Developer" "System" (or 
game type) and possibly "Credits", and maybe (a broad) "Genre" or 
"Category" one, as well as if it supports it a "Cover picture".

What more do you think a library system catalogues? Looking at the 
University I'm working at, that's what they do for DVD's, books, etc. 
etc. I don't think archives would do much more, as a baseline for 
finding things in their collections. Perhaps someone working on one can 
tell us. The only odd thing would be the comparison to book's 
categorisations. Oddly, the University of Nottingham uses an American 
system, which is odd mainly because it has massive sections for 
"American History" but, say, UK history gets dumped into tiny categories 
in "World History" I think, which I found a tad silly, but hey ho!

If we need to standardise those fields, well, are there any I've missed 
out? We can put up some suggested fields as to allow people to, for 
example, provide SQL database copies of what they have with those fields 
with standard field names so that, perhaps, they can be shared (or just 
searched) for historian's sakes if that was part of your intent.

Do you want to write it up somewhat, with more what your intent is?

Anyway, it's more fun talking about bigger databases, I'm glad it went 
off topic a bit :)

Andrew