A tangled web: metadata and problems in game preservation

Abstract

Preserving virtual worlds: an introduction At the beginning of the first decade of the 21st century, the digital preservation community faced a world in which models for preservation were at best inchoate and functioning preservation systems practically non-existent. By the end of the decade, functional, data and economic models (CCSDS, 2002, 2008; Kejser, Nielsen and Thirifays, 2011; Hole et al., 2010) were developed and under active refinement, and open-source software for repository systems intended to preserve digital content, such as DAITSS, DSpace, ePrints, iRods and LOCKSS1, were well developed and in production use at a variety of institutions. Our knowledge of digital objects and our ability to manage and preserve them has undergone a dramatic advance. The inevitable price of these early successes, of course, has been the discovery of even more difficult problems. As we apply the models and tools developed to date to support digital preservation efforts, we encounter new and more complex problems in the technical, legal and administrative aspects of digital preservation. This is particularly true with respect to commercial digital media, where the complex technical nature of these objects, combined with their equally complex intellectual property status (and our occasionally challenging intellectual property laws), create an administrative headache for anyone trying to preserve these digital works in the long term. Web archiving, interactive fiction and multimedia and software of all sorts present a number of issues with which the digital preservation community has struggled, but cannot yet be said to have completely solved. The Preserving Virtual Worlds project, a joint effort of the Rochester Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of Illinois and the University of Maryland, has been studying one sub-domain of these problems, the preservation of computer games, for the past four years. With support from both the Library of Congress’ NDIIP Program and the Institute of Museum & Library Services, our team has investigated what makes digital games difficult to preserve, how we might approach the preservation of these complex objects using existing tools, and how the significant properties of these objects are defined by their creators and users. As might be expected, a close examination of computer games reveals that they pose a number of unique challenges to the digital preservationist. One of the keys to confronting those challenges is creating and maintaining appropriate metadata for the objects to be preserved.

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