An column recently appeared in the New York Times under the title, "When data disappears."  http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/07/opinion/sunday/when-data-disappears.html?_r=1

The author a professor at the University of Maryland suggests that fans of "ancient" computer games like Pac-Man and Super Mario Brothers have been finding solutions on their own.  And since they are gamers they are not primarily  interested in preservation but rather in actually playing the games.  On the professors web site is referenced a report entitled "Preserving Virtual Worlds which may be accessed at the following url:  https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/handle/2142/17097  Below is a brief extract from the 200 page report

"The Preserving Virtual Worlds project is a collaborative research venture of the Rochester Institute of Technology, Stanford University, the University of Maryland, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and Linden Lab, conducted as part of Preserving Creative America, an initiative of the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program at the Library of Congress. The primary goals of our project have been to investigate issues surrounding the preservation of video games and interactive fiction through a series of case studies of games and literature from various periods in computing history, and to develop basic standards for metadata and content representation of these digital artifacts for long-term archival storage."

This appears to provide support to one of the key points that Steve Bailey made with respect to the wisdom of the crowd (see his monograph Managing the Crowd) in which he suggests that users develop their own solutions and that it may be possible for records management to leverage these.  I believe this needs to be balanced against the danger of group think both by records managers and users within any given organic grouping.  Still this column together with Steve's work does give one something to reflect upon.

David B. Gaynon
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Huntington Beach CA, USA



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