 Hi everybody, so we are here for our session with Ann Morrow and Ann will be talking to us about archiving student-authored video games in the digital age. So Ann, take it away. Yes, thank you so much and thank you for your patience. So I'm going to give you a project overview of the project we've been working on for about well over four years now, but the meaningful history is really the last four years. There's a video game design program at the U. It's got both bachelor's degrees and graduate degrees. It's doing really well in 2019. It was ranked number four in the Princeton Review of Game Design Program and it's consistently ranking high. And just seeing how many video games were published, you can see how from 2018 to 2020, there was just a huge number of video games that had been produced by the program. It revealed the increasing popularity. So anyway, in 2008 when the program started, there was no archival plan in place, no preservation plan in place, and their graduate students were earning master's degrees. And several of the faculty members were concerned about the legacy of the game that had been really a start of the program because they were beginning to decay and fall into obsolete format. So in 2018, and the program was like ten years old at this point, conversation started with the library about how might we address this student-authored video game design content. And so I just wanted to show you sort of visually, since we had initially began a conversation that we've gone from a program that had 30 video games to one with over 120 today. And if I were to guess, this year there were probably another 15 games that the program produced. So what I did initially because we were dealing with games that had already become obsolete is I created an archive and the archive is just kind of a brief record for all of the video games that have been produced throughout the program's history. And this at least allowed us to capture to some extent what had already been published by the program. So it's been a fairly popular archive, but I don't know what's going on with the best of Neptune, but it is definitely a heavy hitter. So I wanted you all to see what a typical metadata record looks like in the EAE archive. So here's the record, it's got all the team members, each one of these members is a graduate student who earned a master's degree for their role. In the description we've got what their specific roles were on that team. And I also like to include a link to a playthrough, something visual so that you can read the description, but you can also see a little bit of the gameplay. So frequently YouTube will be very useful in that regard. However, all of this information is collected by a librarian. So one of the things that we have to think about when thinking about sustainability is as the program grows, the burden of doing this cataloging work, even though it's very brief, is going to grow as well. So when we think about video games, the archive is a way of sort of capturing the footprint of the program itself. But if we think about how are we going to archive and preserve a video game, we needed to break it apart and make a distinction between the video game as an experience, an activity that's very user centric, versus a video game as a collection of files or files on a disk or in a zip folder that are required in order for that game to operate. So with the files, that needs digital preservation handling because of all of the vulnerabilities that digital media has. And so the object of the files would be treated with a certain sort of preservation action, whereas the experience of gameplay itself, we would try and capture that through, for example, links to the YouTube videos or making recordings at the EAE program events. So we thought along those two separate lines initially. And in doing that, we created basically a student author permission form and training components to help guide students through a process of making decisions about copyright and making decisions about access. Did you want to limit access to the campus? Do you want to make it more openly available? What exactly do you want to create access to? Marketing materials or do you also want to have more extensive collection of archival material, for example, using the library's video lab to do recordings of the game design creation experience? So we wanted to build into this form basically a way for the team to customize, depending on what they felt comfortable with in terms of archiving their game. And then for the object itself, the game files, we created a submission form for the data repository and the IR. The most sustainable way for us to collect video game files is to keep them in their original zip file and to put them into the ex Libra Rosetta digital preservation system. In other words, not opening the zip file and breaking the individual files apart and trying to funnel those individually into Rosetta, but keeping that zip file as the preservation object. So here are some stats on how this form has gone over. And what I want to draw your attention to is the fact that for the efforts of setting up a way to preserve video game files and for the concerns that the faculty have had and considering the number of games that have thus far been published, we've only been given six video games thus far. So there I or five actually, there's not there has not nobody's been beating down the door. And so there was a claim that we want to preserve these. This is the demand to preserve them. So we created an infrastructure where, you know, understandably, some difficult choices need to be made. But as you can see, students are choosing not to prove their game files with us, at least not at this time. So that brings me to challenges going forward. And I think the biggest one is going to be communication. We've got game design going on in a couple of different places. The Gap Lab is doing what is called serious games. These are games that are with medical or health based function. It's a function of sort of being an aid or a therapy. And that's aside from the program, which is more general game design. So two different libraries are also supporting those programs. And the two different libraries have different ideas about whether or not video games ought to be preserved and how to do them. And so or how to actually do that. So there's not a communication around sustaining and growing a program for preserving this type of scholarship. I think as time goes forward, it will be interesting to see if there is more use of the EAE archive and more demand for access to the game files. But at this point, I think that at least the librarian that I work with, then I are satisfied that we've created an infrastructure for students to be able to archive and preserve the game files, if they so choose. And we'll just have to wait and see how that trends going into the future. And so finally, I wanted to leave you with a couple of additional resources. A link to a really wonderful library guide that my co-author on this project created. It's got training modules for the students as well as the archival agreement. I think, by the way, that the archival agreement is probably likely to go by the wayside and just be replaced with the data repository submission. Either students will choose to submit their game files or they won't. If they want to submit them, they'll fill out that form. And regardless of whether they submit them, the library will make every attempt to create a brief record year to year for each game produced in order to represent the whole collection of scholarship coming out of the program. So that's my presentation. I'm going to stop sharing and see how we are on time. And if anybody has questions. Yeah, thank you, Ann, for that fascinating presentation. We do have time for some questions. So if anybody in the room, let's see, we don't have any questions online. If anybody in the room has questions that they want to share. OK, yeah, if you want to come up to the microphone. I think it's on. Yeah, can you hear me? OK. Yeah, I'm Kim Fleshman. I'm from Bowling Green State University and my question has to do with is anybody asking that has done the six video games you have like for an embargo? Because if you're putting up that zipped file, is that accessible to people to download to play the game? And I'm just thinking is anybody getting it off for, you know, I can see people even on YouTube that are playing video games or reviewing video games and that kind of thing. So didn't know if they were asking to embargo it. Yeah, yeah, we have we have these different tiers of access for students to and one of the tiers of access would be to limit it to campus IP addresses. In other words, you would have to be a member of the community or we could even limit it to building the program is in itself or even just the library. But they would select that kind of access about low of a level of access. And the next level of access above that would probably be campus IP range. And then beyond that, it would be more broadly open. What we have said, though, because this we actually had more students contribute their game, but they were really willing to contribute for the game. If we were willing to store them in a dark archive, use the repository as a dark archive. And we said, you know, we're a library. We're not we're not a dark archive. You can't store your scholarship here so that nobody can see it. So that was how we had a few people drop off because they just weren't sure if they wanted to share and how much they wanted to share. And so we said, you can change your embargo however many times you want. We don't have a limit on embargo. You can put a 25 year embargo on it and nobody's going to, you know, squeeze at that. But I think it's the fact that you have 15 students trying to reap consensus on average. You know, it it makes it difficult for them to address. OK, thank you. I don't know if that answered your question. He answered the question. Oh, OK. People didn't work so many and I think she answered that. OK, yeah. Any other questions? What was that? Oh, I was just seeing if there were any other questions. OK, sorry, I have my sound down too low. OK, it doesn't look like we have any more. OK, but I want to thank you and so much for this fascinating presentation. It was hadn't thought about this before. How do we preserve this technology for the future? So it's it's really interesting. Yeah, well, thank you very much. It's been an interesting project and I've always enjoyed presenting to this group on this work. So thank you so much for having me. Yeah, we love having you. So thank you. All right. Well, have a good conference.