preserving virtual worlds jerome mcdonough graduate school of library & information science...
TRANSCRIPT
Preserving Virtual Worlds
Jerome McDonough
Graduate School of Library & Information Science
University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign
Digital Lives Research Conference:Personal Digital Archives for the 21st Century
The British Library, Feb. 9-11, 2009
Preserving Virtual Worlds…
…because a thing of beauty is a joy forever.
PVW Project Goals
To help develop mechanisms and methods for preserving digital games and interactive fiction by Investigating preservation issues through a series
of archiving case studies; Developing basic standards for metadata and
content representation; Archiving key representative content; and Building community awareness of issues.
PVW Project Partners
Graduate School of Library & Information Science, UIUC
Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, University of Maryland
College of Computing & Information Sciences, Rochester Institute of Technology
Stanford University Libraries Linden Lab
Project Outline
Phase I: Background research on preserving interactive behavior and case set definition
Phase II: Development of schema/ontologies necessary for representation and contextual information and recommendations for best practice in use of wrappers
Phase III: Implementation and testing via ingest of content at Stanford and UIUC.
You are in a maze of twisty little passages,all alike.
Problems: Defining a Game Technically-/spacewar 3.1 24 sep 62 p1. 1 000003 3/ 000003 600061 jmp sbf / ignore seq. break 000004 601561 jmp a40 000005 601556 jmp a1 / use test word for control, note iot 11 00
Problems: Defining a Game Socially
Problems: Bibliographic Control (or lack thereof)
C DWARF STUFF
IF(IDWARF.NE.0) GOTO 60IF(LOC.EQ.15) IDWARF=1GOTO 7160IF(IDWARF.NE.1)GOTO 63IF(RAN(QZ).GT.0.05) GOTO 71IDWARF=2DO 61 I=1,3DLOC(I)=0ODLOC(I)=061DSEEN(I)=0CALL SPEAK(3)ICHAIN(AXE)=IOBJ(LOC)IOBJ(LOC)=AXEIPLACE(AXE)=LOCGOTO 71
Problems: Money (or lack thereof)
Problems: Copyright Law
Orphan WorksIP Owners’ Gross Indifference to Preservation
+ Digital Millennium Copyright Act
Archival Failure
Solutions: OAIS & FRBR Ontologies
Will CrowtherWill CrowtherOriginalOriginal
Fortran IV Fortran IV Source CodeSource Code
ASCII DataASCII DataFileFile
Fortran 66Fortran 66SpecificationSpecification
ANSIANSIX3.4-1968X3.4-1968
Content Content InformationInformationData ObjectData Object
Representation Representation InformationInformation
DECSystem 10DECSystem 10System ReferenceSystem Reference
ManualManual
DECSystem 10DECSystem 10Processor Processor ReferenceReference
ManualManual
TOPS-10TOPS-10Source CodeSource Code
Preservation Preservation Desc.Desc.Context InformationContext Information
Dennis Jerz’Dennis Jerz’DHQ ArticleDHQ Article
Dan WoodsDan WoodsDerivativeDerivative
Fortran IV Fortran IV Source CodeSource Code
ASCII DataASCII DataFileFile
Fortran 66Fortran 66SpecificationSpecification
ANSIANSIX3.4-1968X3.4-1968
Content Content InformationInformationData ObjectData Object
Representation Representation InformationInformation
Dennis Jerz’Dennis Jerz’DHQ ArticleDHQ Article
PREMISPREMISRecordRecord
Provenance InformationProvenance Information
Solutions: Users as Curator
Video courtesy of Internet Archive’s Archiving VirtualWorld’s Moving Image Collectionhttp://www.archive.org/details/virtual_worlds
Solutions: Representation Info
GDFR
PRONOM
At least,not now andnot completely
Solutions: Play Well With Others
Metadata is expensive to produce and demands subject and technological expertise.
Archiving modern games is demanding of storage, particularly given issues of versioning and storage of context information.
So, avoid needless replication by institutional specialization in certain forms of game content, and insuring ability to share metadata and content as widely as possible.
Solutions: Hire a Lobbyist
Restore libraries’ and archives’ ability to make preservation copies even in the face of DRM technologies.
Provide a safe harbor arrangement to enable libraries and archives to provide access to orphan works.
Persuade game authors that their work has value beyond its commercial sale and that they should work with us to preserve it.
