LOC Preservation – 21st Century-Style

Gamasutra reports that the Library of Congress is funding an initiative – Preserving Creative America – to preserve creative media, including movies, digital photography, and video games.

The blog further states

According to a statement announcing the program, many of the included projects will involve “developing standardized approaches to content formats and metadata (the information that makes electronic content discoverable by search engines), which are expected to increase greatly the chances that the digital content of today will survive to become America’s cultural patrimony tomorrow.”

Perhaps of most interest to ArLiSNAPers is the portion of the program called Preserving Virtual Worlds. This partnership between University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, the University of Maryland’s Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities, the Rochester Institute of Technology, Stanford University, and Linden Lab, creator of the virtual world Second Life will focus on preservation standards and methods for virtual worlds, digital games, and electronic literature.

Official LOC press release is here.

Also note that ARTstor is slso one of the focus areas for the Preserving Creative America funding. This most recent initiative is to encourage photographers to submit archive-ready images to digital repositories. Partners on this project include Art on File, Artesia, Josef and Anni Albers Foundation, Northwestern University.

via Library Stuff