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This two-part paper aims to expose the challenges and establish the necessity of preserving digital content, with a focus on console video games. Part two identifies the preservation challenges, methods of preserving digital content and the current efforts by preservation groups and organizations.

Through a method of identifying a video game content which has been lost, or at risk of being lost, describing the challenges presented by the format, and addressing the current preservation efforts, this paper serves as a brief retrospective of the issues and a guide to extending the conversation.

While preserving video game content faces many challenges due to copyright issues and risks associated with digital format, some institutions have made progress that other libraries can follow.

With special attention to the non-gamer, the conversation on video game preservation continues by focusing on the challenges and current efforts.

The aim of this paper is to rethink the concept of significant properties in relationship to video game emulation.

In this paper, video games are examined as complex digital objects, that is digital objects that are constituted by multiple layers that are interconnected with other objects. Starting from the assumption that metadata are fundamental to individuate the authenticity and accuracy of a complex digital object, the research is based on the analysis of the most recent frameworks that propose a substantial use of metadata to perform gaming emulation.

Technical metadata are being used within emulation frameworks to describe digital environments and objects. Although metadata cannot be considered a definitive solution for preserving significant properties of video games, they should be used in a more extensive way across frameworks.

This paper tries to provide insights on video game properties that can help to refine the debate on emulation.

This paper aims to introduce new criteria for evaluating authenticity in digital preservation, particularly in cases related to unreleased software projects and preservation work that occurs in non-institutional settings.

Interpretive visual and formal analysis of image files is performed on three overlapping preservation efforts to understand the ways that self-appointed preservationists reframe content in varied settings. The unreleased mid-1990s console game Sonic X-Treme is used as a case study because assets from the development process have been widely preserved among former developers and enthusiasts alike.

The findings indicate that non-professional preservationists transcode original production files into a variety of formats, ranging from lossy compressed images to contemporary three-dimensional (3D) modeling files. Materials are presented in settings that range from colorful webpages mimicking the appearance of commercial software to browsable file systems. These results show that non-institutional preservation practices embody notions of authenticity that diverge significantly from those of professional archivists.

The study is limited by its focus on a single case study, but helps to facilitate ongoing research concerning preservation of unreleased projects insofar as it surveys the current status of existing projects.

Existing studies within preservation literature have established the need for increased attention paid to unfinished digital works. This study introduces new data and interpretative findings that outline such preservation efforts as they already occur in non-institutional settings.

This two-part study aims to expose the challenges and establish the necessity of preserving digital content, with a focus on console video games.

Through a method of establishing the history of video game consoles, identifying the challenges presented by the format and addressing the current preservation efforts, this article serves as a brief retrospective of the issues and a guide to extending the conversation.

Representing a unique format, heavily reliant on advances in technological and industrial standards, console video games have experienced a demonstrated lack of preservation.

With special attention to the non-gamer, this is an introduction to the conversation and an invitation to lend expertise to not only an often overlooked area of popular culture, which is facing (and in some cases, has experienced) irretrievable loss of information, but also to other formats facing adjustment to the digital, always-online environment.

This paper aims to explore the opportunities and challenges that immersive virtual reality (VR) technologies pose for archival theory and practice.

This conceptual paper reviews research on VR adoption in information institutions and the preservation challenges of VR to identify ways in which VR has the potential to disrupt existing archival theory and practice.

Existing archival approaches are found to be disrupted by the multi-layered structural characteristics of VR, the part–whole relationships between the technological elements of VR environments and the three-dimensional content they contain and the immersive, experiential nature of VR experiences. This paper argues that drawing on perspectives from phenomenology and digital materiality is helpful for addressing the preservation challenges of VR.

The findings extend conceptualizations of preservation by identifying gaps in existing preservation approaches to VR and stressing the importance of “experience” as a central element of archival practice and by emphasizing the embodied dimensions of interpreting archival records and the multiple scales of materiality that archival researchers and practitioners should consider to preserve VR.

These findings provide guidance for digital curators and preservationists by outlining the current thinking on VR preservation and the impact of VR on digital preservation strategies.

This paper gives new insight into VR as an emerging area of concern to digital curation and preservation and expands archival thinking with new conceptualizations that disrupt existing paradigms.

The purpose of this study is to survey the landscape of online collections of digital games.

First, the study identifies existing sites hosting collections and criteria that make a collection valuable for research, then it reports on sites that fit the criteria and analyzes trends.

Most sites provide simple binary downloads, but some choose encapsulation. Common metadata terms consistently include genre, year of release and publisher. Most sites claim the right to provide their collections as “abandonware,” but remove games if they are asked to.

This study was conducted using a very limited subcategory of digital games, which could be expanded in other studies. Future research may require a multilingual team to account for collections based in non–English-speaking countries. Direct communication with sites’ management may be valuable in the future as well, but was not conducted in this study.

The study identifies practices that have developed organically in this field without any guiding standards. Understanding these may aid in Humanities research into digital games, as well as potential collection development in the future.

Digital games are increasingly important as cultural artifacts, and there is a growing effort to preserve them for the future, but there are no standards for collecting and providing them. Understanding how this is currently done can help in providing access into the future for both casual and analytical use.

While game preservation is a growing and active field of research, no study has been published in recent years on this particular subject. It will be valuable for the development of future collections and for research using current ones.

Video game players, equipped with image capturing and rendering features, are taking photographs within digital worlds. This study examines video game photography as a documentary practice. By considering the experiences of a gamer-turned-photographer, this study offers an initial synthesis of this new document phenomenon and provides considerations for categorizing such photos.

To discover the attributes of video game photography, this study utilized an auto-hermeneutic approach with self-interviewing and picture-sorting techniques. The resulting data were analyzed using interpretative phenomenological analysis.

Without tangible artifacts to commemorate gaming experiences, photographs empower the player to document and artistically reconstruct moments from purely digital worlds. The three themes from this study's findings – that video game photographs act as (1) vehicles for storytelling, (2) creative trophies, and (3) aesthetic tokens – reveal how personally meaningful documents emerge from this medium. Furthermore, the findings uncover the fuzzy boundaries between play, artwork, and documentation.

This study explores techniques for categorizing in-game photographs and eliciting gameplay memories. The methods outlined may assist video game researchers, conservators, and archivists with organizing photographs as context materials.

By considering the lived experiences between one individual and their video game photographs, this study expands document theory into the underrepresented hobby of video games.

Author information is one of the primary metadata elements for information access. While assigning “author(s)” has been relatively straightforward in library systems for textual resources, challenges have emerged in recording creatorship information for collaborative creative works, with surrogates erring on the side of caution and providing little information. This study aims to present improvements to the conceptual understanding of collaborative creatorship and relevant cataloging practice in video games.

The current study is a theoretical investigation of the authorship role of individuals in collaborative creative works, using video games as a case study. The investigation is based on the literature on video game user needs and authorship theory.

Reviews of literature present a disconnect between video game information user needs and currently available author information in library systems. Further analysis of the author/creator concept reveals insufficiencies in adopting auteur theory as the theory is applied to film. Exploration of access practices for other large collaborative creative products and an analysis of user tasks show potentially fruitful directions for future studies. This study recommends identifying primary roles that individuals adopt in video game creations and leveraging crowdsourced-creator information in library databases to enhance the visibility of author information for video games.

By incorporating authorship theories and research from various domains such as film studies, intellectual history and library and information science, this study provides interdisciplinary, theoretical considerations as well as practical suggestions to enhance the current cataloging practice.

The preservation and curation of music with real-time or live electronics is challenging. The goal is not to preserve a recording of the performance but to keep the work alive by providing the means to re-perform them. The purpose of this paper is to present the theoretical and practical outcomes of the documentation, dissemination and preservation of compositions with real-time electronics (DiP-CoRE) project.

The methodology combines methods stemming from work psychology and ergonomics with conceptual frameworks constructed according to grounded theory. Data were collected during a six months’ creative process. Subsequent interviews were conducted during confrontations with documents, including observational recordings, sketches and technical specifications.

This paper demonstrates the relevance of the proposed documentation methodology for the preservation of contemporary music with live electronics, focussing on the notion of intelligibility. It brings into light the multiple perspective of the documentation of the activity in a multi-agent creative process, which encompasses what was done but also what could have been done.

The DiP-CoRE project bring to light connections between the notion of intelligibility, the thickness of the activity and boundary objects. The paper proposes further directions of research in order to embed the designed framework within digital repositories.

The documentation methodology, designed and tested in this paper, proposes a framework for practitioners, building on video-stimulated recall as well as documents produced during the creative process. This framework requires less expertise (but a more important technical setup) than a traditional interview-based documentation framework. It thus provides opportunities for various size organizations to build methodical documentation processes and to further build on distributed expertise with computer-supported collaborative work.

This paper proposes a new interdisciplinary documentation methodology relevant in the artistic domain, which brings together transmission with objects and by practice. It specifically defines the relation between this proposal and a high-level model for digital curation, namely, the mixed methods digital curation model. It further creates a link between documentation best practice and the ongoing research in the tracking of creative processes.