Collection Development

Archival Agreement

EAE students own their intellectual property and they decide what the library collects and archives. The thesis game collection is completely student-driven. By offering a comprehensive archiving agreement ingest form, we present options concerning what the library records, archives, preserves, and communicates. The EAE faculty recommended and supported this tiered system of customization. This form can be found at: http://campusguides.lib.utah.edu/eae/archive. 

To facilitate the decision-making process, and align a video game to the appropriate archival and preservation services, we modified the standard publishing permission form into tiers of access the library is able to support. Students have the choice to opt out of allowing the library to archive and preserve their game, and we would retain a record of their decision (which they may reverse in the future, if they choose).

Tiers of access, archiving, and preservation are delineated by degrees. Starting from the option “do nothing”, student-authors may choose to make only some video game materials available. They would be responsible for gathering those materials and handing them off to the library using the campus cloud-hosting service, UBox. Institutional repository staff will create a record for the contributed materials that includes contributed metadata, descriptive and technical metadata, a copyright statement, and relevant keywords.

Copyright has been a major obstacle for the preservation of commercial video games. In a campus setting, however, there is the opportunity to work with the student-authors to craft an access, archiving, and preservation plan for their video game. Because students retain the rights to their intellectual property, student-authors of video games collectively hold the rights to their game. Providing copyright support to the students is an important activity for embedded librarians.

Students also have the option to embargo some or all of the components of their video game, or to limit access to some or all of their video game to campus IP address. Provided there is some level of approved access to the video game, or content related to the work, we’ll provide the corresponding level of archival and digital preservation measures. Where no level of access is permitted, the library will not perform archival or digital preservation measures, retaining only a record of the student-authors’ signed permission form.

Within this archival agreement form, we list the archival significance and what exactly the library does for each tier. This is important because it shows how the library plans to present and connect the various materials. For example, the institutional repository will include, among its collections, a collection for EAE student-created video games. The display record in the institutional repository will be a multipage PDF of still images, author-created documentation and other text and image-based materials submitted by the authors. Media will be archived separately and linked to in the metadata record. Where provided by authors, institutional repository metadata will include link(s) to sites and queries relevant to the video game. Also, students frequently put their video games on Steam (https://store.steampowered.com/), so the library will include links to the video game on Steam, or similar services.

Education

To support student education about crucial elements of the archival agreement form, we created on-demand, self-paced, asynchronous modules in Canvas, our learning management system. Fortunately, Educopia Institute created the Electronic Theses and Dissertation (ETD) Plus. This ETDplus toolkit includes instructor notes, PowerPoints, YouTube videos, and guidance briefs. Leveraging this existing resource, we created 7 modules:

• Module 1: Background
• Module 2: Copyright
• Module 3: Data organization
• Module 4: File Formats
• Module 5: Metadata
• Module 6: Storage
• Module 7: Version Control

Each module includes learning objectives, an introduction (generally brief text followed by an embedded Educopia ETDplus video), and a final knowledge check. The knowledge check included questions about the module’s content and a reflection. These modules are licensed under CC Attribution Non Commerical Share Alike.

Securing Items

The EAE faculty posted the archival agreement form as an assignment in the Capstone class’ Canvas course. We provided the faculty with a brief introduction to the new “assignment” and offered special drop-in office hours during the last week of school to help the student-authors. 

Since the students create thesis games, the thesis office does not work with the program since there’s “nothing” to collect, from the thesis office’s viewpoint. (Most ETDs are directed to the library from the thesis office.) By working with the capstone faculty, we can ensure the students are introduced to the archival form. Next year, we hope to briefly present in the capstone class, so we can review the project and form with the students.

Educopia Institute. (2017). Electronic Theses and Dissertation (ETD) Plus. Retrieved from https://educopia.org/electronic-theses-and-dissertation-etd-plus/

Nilson, L. (2016). Teaching at its Best: A research-based resource for college instructors (Fourth edition). San Francisco, California: Jossey-Bass.