[game_preservation] Frank Cifaldi's preservation article on 1Up

[Henry Lowood]

As far as technical resources, I think we are getting close to where we 
need to be.  There are still issues to be worked out, but frankly, it is 
no better for individual collectors as far as insuring long-term 
availability of data and metadata. 

The big problems right now are "soft" issues -- mostly legal and 
managerial.    You can't expect to simply dump materials in an 
institutional repository.  Generally, some form of transfer of deed and 
negotiation of rights issues is involved, and with regard to the 
materials we are discussing here, these matters are currently quite 
difficult.  Which is not to say that we are not working on them.  For 
example, in the LoC project, we are working on an instrument for working 
out the nasty matter of figuring out who owns which assets on a Second 
Life island; we are testing a tool for dealing with that and helping us 
to manage transfer of materials.    We have also dealt with some of 
these issues in the test cases of game software, e.g., DOOM. 

Maybe the next step is do set up something similar to a meeting we had 
at the Computer History Museum a few years ago, the intention of which 
was to bring together private collectors and institutions -- the 
PT-boats and the battleships, so to speak.

Henry

Mike Melanson wrote:

> Devin Monnens wrote:

>> Austin are getting there (as is the LoC), but what types of resources 

>> and recognition do we need? 

>

> Resources: A bunch of hard drives. :) Granted, the first and foremost 

> thing that I care about preserving are the digital bits themselves. 

> There's also the matter of the myriad packaging.

>


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

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