Archiving

Establishing a resilient framework to guide the archiving and preservation of digital objects continues to challenge librarians; moreover, applying that framework to video games introduces additional challenges.

Open Archival Information System (OAIS)

Introduced in 1997 as a framework for archival processes of collecting, archiving, and preserving digital objects, Open Archival Information System, or OAIS, was developed by the Consultative Committee for Space Data Systems (CCSDS) to serve as an abstract model for the stakeholder interactions with digital content. The logic of the OAIS structure brings together the primary stakeholders for digital content: producers, archivists, preservationists, librarians, and the community making use of the content, to serve in specific roles designed to distribute the archival and preservation responsibilities across a broader community of users and information professionals. Digital content is contributed by producers, placed in an archival information package, or AIP, by library professionals. Each of the stakeholders have a clearly defined role in OAIS, related to submitting materials, collecting content, packaging information, and providing support to the user community of today and tomorrow.

The OAIS structure functions to bring content producers, information archivists, and preservationists, and content users together in forming a concept of what the contents of an AIP ought to contain. The required conditions and characteristics of the collection are re-evaluated on an on-going basis as a means of ensuring relevance and continuity of access to the digital object and supporting materials. Librarians work with producer and user communities to define the characteristics, qualities, and properties of an AIP that will preserve future access to the content.

For the content to be useful in the future, there needs to be information about its properties, specifications, operating systems, etc. An AIP needs to contain all of the information necessary to access and use the content it holds. For video games and other multi-file multi-format works, the amount of documentation that would be required to satisfy this expectation is enormous.

While OAIS provides a solid structure for stakeholders to interact, OAIS is not without issues. Chiefly, those issues have to do with the designated community and significant properties elements of OAIS.

Designated Communities, as defined in the OAIS framework, are communities of current, future, and potential content users. Designated Communities serve an important role in determining what content has archival value, who the primary audience is (both currently and in the future), and the tools, skill-sets, and materials that are needed to use the content. Bettivia has suggested Designated Communities address a single type of digital collection or type of digital object rather than addressing a group of collections or variety of objects, as “different people want to save different things” (Bettiva, 2016, p.4). The most effective Designated Communities are those where “significance is situational [and] depends on the audience and their relationship to the digital object” (Bettiva, 2016, p.3).

Designated communities are frequently mistaken as representing actual users, when instead they “might encompass… some actual users, it by no means pretends to be a stand-in for all users more generally.” Designated Communities, writes Bettivia, “are bound together with the assumption of preservation for someone rather than preservation of something” (Bettivia, 2016, p.1). We need EAE students, staff, and faculty to help us develop policies that answer the question: “Who will be using the content in the future, and what will they need to use it?”

The Designated Community dictates the relevant properties of an AIP. Called Significant Properties, these documents (technical specifications, user manuals, etc.) are deemed vital to ensuring access and utility to the primary audience for the content. The volume of documentation for programs, platforms, peripherals, and more, that would be required of a video game AIP to satisfy the significant properties requirement is extensive. Significant properties can instead be collected, cataloged, and maintained in a closed repository.

Using OAIS for EAE games

OAIS, as McDonough had put it, is “an awkward fit” for digital objects like video games. Creating an OAIS-compliant AIP for a video game easily gets hamstrung on the mechanics, it becomes a systems, vendors, and products question. An ideal system for archiving video games using AIPs was an open question in 2011 and remains an open question today. Just as a Designated Community is in some important ways an amorphous and open-ended body, so too is how we can think of an AIP’s container. Working with the resources available to us today and within current practices, archival content will be dispersed across several sectors of the library. 

The container for the AIP will be its record in the institutional repository (IR). The IR record will link to and redirect searchers to elements of archival content both internal and external to the library. The IR record will display or link to shareable content, descriptive metadata, significant properties metadata, and provide avenues to access a copy of circulating game files.

OAIS has been widely discussed and frequently criticized for promoting standards that are ambiguous and difficult to translate into practice. This is partly because OAIS was not meant to be a rigid framework. OAIS, as Schumann and Recker put it, is “an abstract and highly generic conceptualization of a preservation and dissemination environment” (Schumann and Recker, p.7). Creating the environment envisioned in an OAIS model requires the interaction of an archive, the management of that archive, the content producers, and the consumers of that content. 

Librarians and archivists structure an AIP based on what the designated community has agreed is necessary. Student-authors seeking to have their video game archived and preserved submit their wrap kit, metadata, and other content related to the game. Using the metadata provided by the student-authors, librarians can help with the completion of the AIP by collecting technical information and specifications in the form of user manuals and product literature. We propose, rather than adding this large volume of literature to the AIP, to instead create a Significant Properties Archive that contains technical documentation. Repository managers can distribute the content it contains upon request.

Bettivia, R. S. (2015). Mapping significance properties in OAIS: A case study with video games extended poster abstract. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 52(1), 1-4. doi:10.1002/pra2.2015.1450520100136

Bettivia, R. S. (2016). The power of imaginary users: Designated communities in the OAIS reference model. Proceedings of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 53(1), 1-9. doi:10.1002/pra2.2016.14505301038

Decker, A., Egert, C., Phelps, A., & McDonough, J. P. (2012). Technical properties of play a technical analysis of significant properties for video game preservation. Paper presented at the 4th International IEEE Consumer Electronic Society – Games Innovation Conference, IGiC 2012.

McDonough, J. P. (2011). Packaging videogames for long-term preservation: Integrating FRBR and the OAIS reference model. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 62(1), 171-184. doi:10.1002/asi.21412

McDonough, J. P. (2012). ‘Knee-deep in the data’: Practical problems in applying the OAIS Reference Model to the preservation of computer games. Paper presented at the Proceedings of the Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences.

Schumann, N., & Recker, A. (2013) De-mystifying OAIS compliance: Benefits and challenges of mapping the OAIS reference model to the GESIS Data Archive. Iassist Quarterly, 2013.

Sköld, O. (2018). Understanding the “expanded notion” of videogames as archival objects: A review of priorities, methods, and conceptions. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 69(1), 134-145. doi:10.1002/asi.23875