Preserving Virtual Worlds Jerome McDonough Graduate School of Library & Information Science...

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.

Thank you

For more information: http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw

Jerome McDonough

jmcdonou@illinois.edu