Preserving Virtual Worlds

MITH

This award from the Library of Congress places MITH and its partners at the forefront of those addressing a range of increasingly urgent questions involving the preservation of creative works that are "born digital"

MITH is partnering with the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Stanford University, the Rochester Institute ofTechnology, and Linden Lab (creators of Second Life) for a project funded by the Library of Congress’s National Digital InformationInfrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIIPP) on PRESERVING VIRTUAL WORLDS. The two-year $590,000 award under NDIIPP’s Preserving CreativeAmerica program will be shared among the project participants.

The Preserving Virtual Worlds project will explore methods for preserving digital games, interactive fiction, and shared realtimevirtual spaces. Major activities will include developing basic standards for metadata and content representation and conducting aseries of archiving case studies for early video games and electronic literature, as well as Second Life, the popular and influentialmulti-user online world. According to Fraistat, "This award from the Library of Congress places MITH and its partners at the forefront ofthose addressing a range of increasingly urgent questions involving the preservation of creative works that are "born digital"–frominteractive electronic literature, to digital games, to virtual worlds such as Second Life. We are especially pleased to have as an industrypartner, Linden Lab, the creator of Second Life itself."

In addition to contributing to the work on Second Life, Maryland will take the lead on interactive fiction/electronic literature as asub-domain of the project, and will be occupied with all aspects of scoping, metadata, intellectual property, evaluation, and archiving ofthese materials. We will initially focus on a small number of targeted works of recognized cultural and literary significance, includingformer Poet Laureate Robert Pinsky’s 1984 interactive novel Mindwheel, Will Crowther’s ADVENTURE (written in 1975 and widely considered theearliest interactive text of its kind), and selected items from a large private collection of 1980s-era hardware and software recentlygifted to MITH.

The project begins in January 2008.

View the project website »