1. 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

2. Preserving Virtual Worlds… …because a thing of beauty is a joy forever.

3. 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.

4. 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

5. 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.

6. You are in a maze of twisty little passages, all alike.

7. Problems: Defining a Game Technically -/spacewar 3.1 24 sep 62 p1. 1 0000033/ 000003600061jmp sbf/ ignore seq. break 000004601561jmp a40 000005601556jmp a1/ use test word for control, note iot 11 00

8. Problems: Defining a Game Socially

9. 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

10. Problems: Money (or lack thereof)

11. Problems: Copyright Law Orphan Works IP Owners’ Gross Indifference to Preservation + Digital Millennium Copyright Act Archival Failure

12. Solutions: OAIS & FRBR Ontologies Will Crowther Original Fortran IV Source Code ASCII Data File Fortran 66 SpecificationANSIX3.4-1968 Content Information Data Object Representation Information DECSystem 10 System Reference Manual DECSystem 10 ProcessorReferenceManual TOPS-10 Source Code Preservation Desc. Context Information Dennis Jerz’ DHQ Article Dan Woods Derivative Fortran IV Source Code ASCII Data File Fortran 66 SpecificationANSIX3.4-1968 Content Information Data Object Representation Information Dennis Jerz’ DHQ Article PREMISRecord Provenance Information

13. Solutions: Users as Curator VideoVideo courtesy of Internet Archive’s Archiving Virtual World’s Moving Image Collection http://www.archive.org/details/virtual_worlds

14. Solutions: Representation Info GDFR PRONOM At least, not now and not completely

15. 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.

16. 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.

17. Thank you For more information: http://pvw.illinois.edu/pvw Jerome McDonough jmcdonou@illinois.edu