Library [and Information Science] School to lead team that will preserve virtual worlds. 

With help from the Library of Congress, and in partnership with three other institutions of higher education and one commercial game lab, a team from Illinois’ Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) will lead a two-year project to preserve virtual worlds – early video games, electronic literature and “Second Life,” an interactive multiplayer game.

The project, titled “Preserving Virtual Worlds,” is thought to be the first effort to explore methods for preserving digital games and interactive fiction, and it comes not a moment too soon given that interactive media are “at high risk for loss as technologies rapidly become obsolete,” said Jerome McDonough, the GSLIS faculty member who will serve as lead investigator of the project. Janet Eke, also of GSLIS, is the project coordinator.

Illinois will coordinate the partners’ work on the project. Partners are the Rochester Institute of Technology, Stanford University and the University of Maryland, and Linden Lab, creator of “Second Life.” The Illinois team’s focus primarily will be technical.

Thank god for Boing Boing, which amazingly has provided exceptional coverage of all matters cultural heritage. Last week they reposted a message from Rick Prelinger’s blog about the decision by Society of American Archivists to NOT save the archive of its listservs dating back to 1993. An archivist responded to the post noting that it is common practice in the archival community to dispose of “routine correspondence.” (and I did dispose of lots of “routine correspondence” while processing collections in my archival days…)

Having recently spent a lot of time conducting research on the history of museum computing, I would love to have access to this sort of routine correspondence from my community of interest. Hell, I’m still pissed that MCN operated a listserv for years that didn’t even have an archive of messages (which we corrected upon moving to Mailman). John, if you’re listening, I’ll also be happy to personally take the archives of Museum-L off your hands if you decide it needs to be deleted!

However I argue that the listserv of any professional community is more than “routine” correspondence. Within those messages are the history of how a community has developed and changed. What are the major arguments the community went through? What were the issue of the day? Who was talking about them – who was responding? While within a larger corporate archives, or even within my own personal archive of e-mails I can see the value of pruning to eliminate duplication, or developing a strategy to eliminate irrelevant messages. This kind of appraisal usually requires a fair amount of labor. Is the cost of that labor even close to equal to the cost of storage (the SAA Council suggests it lacks sufficient “evidential or informational value”)? Probably not. Are there appropriate places and times to expunge routine correspondence – you bet. Is the Archivists listserv that place. No.

Rick mentions that the Internet Archive has some information from the publicly available archives – but just think of all the other parts of the “hidden web” that have been missed.

What is even more frustrating is that the message Rick posted was dated March 13, only a matter of weeks before the archive will cease to exist. SAA, I’m disappointed.

Off to a meeting, so I’ll have to leave these thoughts unfinished.

Anne @ HangingTogether comments on Richard Coxe’s summary of a new book The Soldier’s Pen: Firsthand Impressions of the Civil War. Both Anne and Richard note concern for the preservation of the personal experiences of today’s verterans, their e-mails, blogs, etc. Some recent studies have shown however that younger generations use e-mail less frequently and rely more on instant messaging and social networking sites like MySpace (grumble…where did this meme come from…). Coxe notes that Soldier’s Penn includes a “discussion about how the production of letters and other documents was affected by the ebb and flow of stationary supplies.” The equivalent here may not only whether the Internet is available to soldiers, but in what form…are certain sites blocked? What happens when they return home to broadband connections with lots of digital media in their pockets? One of the successes of YouTube has been as a place to broadcast personal deployment experiences. See “YouTube Offers Soldier’s Eye Experience of Iraq War” on MediaShift.

While I’ve seen evidence that some soldiers and their families are making attempts to preserve communications the real history of this conflict may come from efforts like the Internet Archive or various Internet preservation projects. I have yet to see a Iraq war project along the lines of the September 11 Digital Archive or the Hurricane Digital Memory Bank, so much may have already slipped through the cracks. Accoding to the LOC’s MINERVA Project site, they do have an “Iraq War” preservation program underway. YouTube and other streaming formats would seem to present a challenge to automated harvesting of sites – not to mention the huge copyright mess that privately created multimedia will involve (as noted in MediaShift).
Then of course, there is also MyDeathSpace, a place for MySpace profiles of those who have passed. (offline at the time of this posting)

More interesting is what will historians do with these materials. I sometimes worry that the field is still slowly adapting to these new forms of communication and relying heavily on discrete paper-based collections. Will the kinds of social network analysis, bibliometrics, information visualization, etc. that I see in the LIS community make their way into historian’s hands anytime soon? (yes, I know CHNM is watching….but what about others?). What role do the builders of digital libraires have in facilitating this kind of research. I wrote recently about my experience with Web of Knowledge…should a digital archive provide similar kinds of analysis tools? Will we allow researchers to share their analysis tools in an open-source, history mashup – an API: “archives programming interface”? I don’t see it yet….just day dreaming.

And as a parting meme, I tag Mark to comment on this thread. I’d be interested in hearing your insights on what it looks like from the other side.