Look what my college Kjell came across and was kind enough to send me….
“RIT Joins Library of Congress Partnership to Preserve Online Games and Virtual Worlds Rochester Institute of Technology (09/19/07) Researchers from the Rochester Institute of Technology will participate in an initiative to develop standards for preserving virtual worlds and online games. The Preserving Virtual Worlds project, which the Library of Congress will administer under the National Digital Information Infrastructure and Preservation Program (NDIPP), will focus on basic standards for metadata and content representation, and also use archiving case studies of video games, electronic literature, and the Second Life virtual world to study preservation issues. “This is incredibly important work because the worlds we are playing with today will be gone in a flash, with no recordable way of recreating them for future generations,” says Andrew Phelps, director of game design and development and RIT’s principal investigator on the project. “Virtual worlds are affecting millions of people in their daily lives and while we can record and store some of the social commentary that happens about them from the outside, it seems almost silly that we in fact can’t store the original work beyond a scant number of years.” RIT’s Christopher Egert, assistant professor of IT, and Elizabeth Lawley, director of the Laboratory for Social Computing in the Center for Advancing the Study of Cyberinfrastructure, will also be involved in the project. They will join researchers from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Stanford University, the University of Maryland, and Linden Lab on the project, which has received a $590,000 grant from the Library of Congress.”