 Well, I think it's 1205, we've got 12 people in the room, so we want to say welcome to everyone. I'm Janice Robinson, I'm the moderator, I'm from BYU, and these two gals are from the University of Utah, who is our neighbor, sometimes are foe, but mostly we love them, right? Anyway, so this is a follow-up on some video stuff, just a reminder to everyone to keep your video and microphone off until the point where we are asking questions. This is also a 20-minute session, so we need to speed along and leave a little few minutes at the end for questions, and you can also enter questions in the Q&A, and then the presenters can see those, so take it away. Alright, thank you, welcome everyone to our presentation, please put your questions in the Q&A, and we'll answer those at the end. I want to thank everyone for coming, my name is Tally, and I'm the liaison to our video game program, and Anne is in charge of our institutional repository, which includes the student theses and dissertations, next slide. Before we get started, I'd like to acknowledge that the University of Utah is the traditional and ancestral homelands of the Shoshone, Paiute, Ghoshu, and Yut tribes, and is a crossroads for indigenous peoples. Next. Founded over a decade ago, the Entertainment Arts and Engineering Program, or EAE, has offered multiple degree options for students. According to US News, EAE is currently ranked number one among public institutions for game designs. EAE has really set itself apart from other programs, the students don't only learn about game design, but they create video games which are available for download, usually for free. The students create many games throughout their coursework, and it cumulates in a thesis game. The question quickly became, how does the library collect, preserve, and disseminate these complex theses? Next. Video games are especially appealing for this question because of their inherent duality as both an object and an activity, how and should we preserve both? We thought video games would also be a case study to explore preservation and dissemination strategies for emerging forms of complex digital scholarship. Next. A major challenge associated with this type, this question of preserving and disseminating complex digital scholarship is the ever-changing software and hardware. There is a lot of literature about emulators and similar concepts, but Ann and I were more interested in practical steps that we could take immediately. So we applied for an institute, a museum, and library services grant to explore this. Next. After receiving an IMLS grant, we spent a year researching and talking with EAE. We published a white paper about our findings. It's finally named the EDS report or emerging digital scholarship. Since then, we've applied our recommendations and are actively collecting, preserving, and disseminating EAE's video game theses. In this presentation, we'll highlight a few of our recommendations and what this has looked like moving forward. Next. Here are key recommendations, which we'll explore a bit more. I'll cover the first two and Ann will take the last two. The image on this slide shows a handful of EAE's published student games. Next. Students decide everything in this process. EAE was very clear that as intellectual property owners of the games, the students as a team decide if and what the library collects, preserves, and disseminates. We created a tiered system of increasingly collecting more content for the game record. The hope is to collect the entire RAP kit, which includes everything the student authors submit for their theses. The students use an archival agreement form, which is an ungraded assignment, and also posted on the EAE research guide to indicate these preferences. An educational course was created to support student decision making. The students also use this form to communicate their copyright ownership and any permissions and the level of access that others have will have to the game. This latter section includes an embargo option and limited access in the special collections reading room. Next. The second recommendation is to let student authors provide metadata for their game. Part of the archival agreement form is this author provided metadata section. This gives students voice to how their games are described. The images on the slide show the various metadata fields. Drawing from previous literature, especially Dr. Lee's from the University of Washington, this list is pretty lengthy, but it gives multiple access points for a variety of gamers. Practically, the author provided metadata provides the library a starting point to accurately describe the game. This is especially important because metadata practitioners may not have the necessary equipment or expertise to play the game and then describe it. This section offers the students a chance to reflect on their work and help streamline library processes. Next slide. Excuse me. As a result, all the game theses have an expanded record based off the student-provided metadata. About a year after the game is released, Ann will go search Google and add any news, awards or reviews of the video game and add that content to the metadata record. There are several games which have received Steam Community Greenlight Game recognition plus other awards and recognitions too. For example, Best Police Training Simulator, the image on the left, won the first place citizen award at the Microsoft Imagine Cup. I'll now turn the time over to Ann. Thank you, Tally. Here's the EAE archive. This is where we collected all of the student-contributed metadata and also went out and curated a broader footprint for both the current games and the games that have been produced over the history of the program. Currently, there are 125 games over the 11-year history. Because students are required as part of the coursework to publish their game, we found that they particularly like using Steam these days. Steam is a community of gamers. It supports search and discovery and it's been used by many of the students as the publishing platform. Awards that Steam offer like the Greenlight Awards are community-selected awards that are very coveted. Because of this, there's a lot of incentive for the student to provide really detailed metadata about their game. We will come here and curate information here and augment the record that we have for it in our archive. Another site that's very useful is YouTube. YouTube is a publishing platform for trailers to games and demos to games. YouTube very helpfully has an algorithm that will recognize when a new game has been uploaded and also when YouTube community members have created videos of them playing that game. This is an opportunity to explore what the impact is of these games after they've been published. Something that is really difficult to do with other types of media. But this games lend themselves well to this sort of impact. There are other platforms that students have used. Recently, itch.io and Moby games are used as well as Google Play or Apple. Many years ago, a few students used DeSura for their game. You can see here that DeSura has had sort of an up and down history since its introduction a little over 10 years ago. This is a good reminder to us of just the volatility of curating inside a gaming environment. It's subject to the movement of the market. It's something to keep in mind. Moving on to our preservation plan. We're folding it into the existing preservation plan for our digital library. What we will do is accept the original game files in a zip file format and we will deposit that in the Rosetta digital preservation system. We will also have fixity checks run on the file by the preservation archivist. That will serve as our back-end. Our front-end will be a collection in our IR that's data repository. There will be cross-references between the data repository and Rosetta and the EAE archive. How did the students respond to what Tally and I came up with? Well, since we started collecting analytics in 2019, there was really low rates of interest in doing any archival or preservation measures and very disappointingly, there were many games published but not that many forms filled out. We did become aware of a flaw in the permissions form which we were able to correct, which sort of implied the library would be willing to provide dark storage. So now we require some form of embargo or some level of restricted access, but it has to be accessible. This year we're seeing more engagement in terms of the number of games published. We're seeing a few more people participate and also there's more interest in taking us up on what we can do to preserve our game. Our plan in the future is to support the circulation of the wrap kits that we're storing in Rosetta. Once they're able to circulate, we want to have a repository of user manuals and technical specifications for the hardware software tools that were used to develop the game because this will be a way to support their replication and reproduction and emulation in the future. And thank you so much for your time and attention. We've got links to our white paper and website. We'd be happy to start taking your questions. There are two questions. One, do you have a size limit for preservation zip packages? No, we currently do not have a size limit. Great. And the other question is, are games submitted in lieu of a thesis or to supplement a thesis? The thesis is the video game itself. Okay. So there's no paper thesis about the game that they submit to the thesis office. So that's kind of why we're having to work directly with EAE in terms of getting those because for their programs, nothing is getting routed to the thesis office and then eventually back to the library. That's why that collaboration has been so essential. Oh, great. One other question. How big are the zip packages? There's an echo here. How big are the zip packages? The zip packages? I can see if I can find one up. I can pull one up. I didn't even think to look or inquire. Give me a second. I will answer that and if we can move on, that would probably be best. And I'll look for an answer. Here's another question. Two questions. Are there similar programs like this at other institutions? This was very unique to a lot of us and another person said, do you have a policy on accessibility or how do you handle that issue if it comes up? Okay, so accessibility is something that the students are in charge of and so it's very important that they understand what they're providing access to and that they get to make that decision of what level of access. We can limit it to campus. We can limit it to the library. We can limit it to the program itself. But it's an important decision for them to make. They do make a decision about their copyright which indicates whether or not any files that they created can be modified or if they can be copied and with attribution. So Tally's work with increasing the copyright education over the past year has, I believe, resulted in more participation because the students have a better understanding of what they're doing. And I'm sorry, there was a question about policy. I forgot what that... They just wanted to know if there were other programs like this at other institutions. We have not found one. That is not to say there isn't one, but we did look at game development programs and there doesn't seem to be a connection between the program and the academic library. There are academic libraries preserving video games. Some are exploring emulation, some are collecting legacy games. And I know that there is some of that collection building going on at my library, even though I'm not directly involved in that aspect of it. Yeah, I guess I read that question differently. Similar programs, game design programs, that's how I read it. And that's yes. I don't know which meaning of similar programs that you want us to answer, Emily. But there are some other great game design programs as well. And to our knowledge, we haven't come across many libraries that are kind of actively collecting those theses. You know, I think this is fascinating technology because all of us theses and dissertations, you know, we've transitioned from paper to digital, but they're mostly PDFs. But I'm assuming that if some student wanted to have a lot of, you know, interviews or YouTube or something, then this same technology or processes could be used. So we have a lot to learn from your work over the last four years. Thank you very much. We think that there is an application here for other forms of scholarship and video games are a really good test case to begin to explore how are we going to support born digital complex scholarship in our institutional repositories and libraries. And I think there are exciting opportunities to work really closely with developers in the development process to record that process and that is going to even further enrich those records. There's one more question. Someone said she wasn't aware of ex-libris Rosetta. Is this the only option you found for preservation of these packets? It's just the in-house solution. We were focused on doing something locally sustainable because this is not beyond the grant. We have not received funding. And so we're using existing systems to fold in an archival and preservation plan for the video games. Just piggybacking them on top of existing systems. Well I definitely appreciate all your research and hard work and it's going to take a lot of thinking outside the box to accommodate students who are doing things differently than what we're all used to. Does anybody else have any questions? I see something in the chat. People are just saying thank you for presenting and hearing about these examples of video games. You're breaking new ground here so you got to stay around for a while so we can all learn from you. We will try. Okay it's great. Thank you. It's been a pleasure. This PowerPoint is available in the replay section right? It's what I'm told. It should be. Anyway great. So thank you so much. Thank you very much. Have a good conference everyone. You too. It's great to see you up north on my screen.