[SPG_Active_Members] Library of Congress funding project to Preserve Virtual Worlds

[Randall Neff]

 Library School to Lead Team That Will Preserve Virtual Worlds
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (08/21/07) Lynn, Andrea

A team from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign's Graduate
School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) will lead a two-year
project to preserve virtual worlds such as those found in early video
games, electronic literature, and Second Life. The project, called
"Preserving Virtual Worlds," will also be worked on by partners at the
Rochester Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University
of Maryland, and Linden Lab, the creator of Second Life. GSLIS faculty
member and lead investigator of the project Jerome McDonough says
interactive media is at a "high risk for loss as technologies rapidly
become obsolete." He says the goal is to develop "mechanisms and
methods" to preserve digital games and interactive fiction. "In
particular, we will be looking at the metadata and knowledge
management problems involved in preservation of highly interactive
digital works," McDonough says. The Library of Congress is funding the
project with a two-year, $590,000 grant through the "Preserving
Creative America Initiative," the most recent initiative of the
National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program.
The first phase of the project, which is set to begin in January, will
attempt to identity information needed to ensure any preservation
strategy is successful. In the second phase the team will try to
develop XML stands for encoding information so it can be included in
digital repositories. The final phase of the project will focus on
testing the preservation technologies the team developed in early
phases.

http://www.otal.umd.edu/~mgk/blog/archives/000932.html

Randall.