Preserving Virtual Worlds Computer Games & Digital Preservation

Overview  Digital Preservation Today  Theoretical Perspectives  Preservation Strategies  Data & Metadata / 数据 & 元数据  Preservation Systems  Preserving Virtual Worlds  Who cares about games?  Game Preservation Problems  Game Preservation Solutions  PVW2: Future Research

The Problem

Theoretical Perspectives  Information Theory  Sampling & Quantizaton  Information Loss

Theoretical Perspectives  Archival Theory  Authenticity & Integrity  Diplomatics  Original Order & Archival Bond

Theoretical Perspectives  Library Science Functional Requirements For Bibliographic Records Data Model

Theoretical Perspectives  Open Archival Information System Reference Model

Theoretical Perspectives  Open Archival Information System Reference Model

Preservation Strategies  Conservation  Emulation  Migration  Documentation  Re-enactment

Preservation Strategies  The Emulation vs. Migration Wars  Creator Perpective vs. Consumer Perspective

Data & Metadata 数据 & 元数据  Library of Congress Sustainability Factors Library of Congress Sustainability Factors  Disclosure  Adoption  Transparency  Self-Documentation  External Dependencies  Impact of Patents  Technological Protection Measures

Data & Metadata 数据 & 元数据  Preservation Metadata  PREMIS PREMIS  Technical Metadata (MIX, TextMD)MIXTextMD  Format Registries  PRONOM  Unified Digital Format Registry PRONOM

Preservation Systems  Dspace + Fedora (Duraspace) DspaceFedora  LOCKSS (Stanford University) LOCKSS  DAITSS (Florida Center for Library Automation) DAITSS  Archivematica (Artefactual Systems, Inc.) Archivematica  DPSP (National Archives of Australia) DPSP  RODA (Portuguese National Archives) RODA  iRODS (DICE Center, University of North Carolina) iRODS  Rosetta (Ex Libris) Rosetta

Preservation Services  MetaArchive Cooperative MetaArchive Cooperative  Portico Portico  HathiTrust HathiTrust  OCLC Digital Archive OCLC Digital Archive  DuraCloud (Duraspace) DuraCloud

Preserving Virtual Worlds 1

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, University of Illinois  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 sep 62 p / jmp sbf/ ignore seq. break jmp a 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 60 IF(LOC.EQ.15) IDWARF=1 GOTO 71 60IF(IDWARF.NE.1)GOTO 63 IF(RAN(QZ).GT.0.05) GOTO 71 IDWARF=2 DO 61 I=1,3 DLOC(I)=0 ODLOC(I)=0 61DSEEN(I)=0 CALL SPEAK(3) ICHAIN(AXE)=IOBJ(LOC) IOBJ(LOC)=AXE IPLACE(AXE)=LOC GOTO 71

Problems: Money (or lack thereof)

Problems: Copyright Law  “Orphan” works  Intellectual Property Owners’ Indifference  U.S. Legal Structure / Digital Millennium Copyright Act

Solutions: OAIS & FRBR Ontologies Work Expression Manifestation Item Successor Whole/part Transformation Revision Translation Successor Whole/Part Transformation Alternate Whole/Part Reproduction Whole/Part Representation Information Context Provenance

Solutions: OAIS & FRBR Ontologies DOOM 1 MS-DOS EXE Specification DOOM WAD Specification Content Information Data Object Representation Information Preservation Desc. Context Information PREMISRecord Provenance Information Intel 486 Dev Manual DOOM WAD DOOMBinaries Speed Run DOOM Speed Run File Work Expression Manifestation Item

Solutions: XML Packaging URI for Rep Info URI for Rep Info PVW Ontology

Solutions: Users as Curator VideoVideo courtesy of Internet Archive’s Archiving Virtual World’s Moving Image Collection

Solutions: User as Curator

Solutions: Representation Information  No Existing Solution  Unified Digital Format Registry is not sufficient.  Solution requires:  Copies of Standards Documents…  …treated as first class objects of preservation…  …including their own representation information and context information.  Economies of scale.

Solutions: Play Well With Others  Metadata is expensive to produce.  Archiving modern games is demanding of storage.  So, avoid needless replication of effort by institutional specialization and sharing content & metadata.

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.

Preserving Virtual Worlds 2

PVW2 Project Goals  To determine the significant properties of games that must be preserved  To provide guidance to preservationists regarding the appropriate strategy to maintain significant properties

PVW2 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

Project Outline  Phase I: Significant Properties Investigation  Content Analysis of Game Case Set  Interviews with Game Creators, Users & Curators  Phase II: Strategies for Preservation  Emulation Experiments  Migration Experiments

PVW2: Content Analysis

Thank you! 谢谢 Prof. Jerome McDonough Graduate School of Library & Information Science University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Translation by Ms. Yan Wang Graduate School of Library & Information Science University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign