30 January, 2007 Gamer Feedback Project
Emulation has become an important issue for librarians and archivists seeking to store and provide access to computer systems for future generations of technology researchers. It is important to remember that also there exists a social and human context within which this software is used. This is especially visible with regard to video games. Not only does the text of a video game have the potential to be quite different each time the player interacts with it, but the experience of playing a video game can also often be quite social one. It is therefore beneficial to try to provide some account of the social and cultural context in which these games were played. The Gamer Feedback digital library project is an attempt to digitize for preservation this context, through recording oral narratives of ordinary people who played video games over the past two decades.
Creating a collection as a digital library allows for the possibility of providing access to the collection on the Internet. Additionally, with the right system implemented, there is the potential for gamers from other countries to submit their own audio narratives electronically to administrators to be included in the digital library.
More can be read about the genesis of the project on the initial project page which I created to discuss the project, people and terminology involved. You can also take a look at images of the project and of Greenstone on a flickr set I’ve created.
I worked on this project with a fellow MLIS Student, Rebecca Hale, as an assignment for our course on Digital Library Systems. Our assignment was to build a small demo collection (8-12 library objects) using Greenstone. This post is a slightly altered version of the short de-breif report I submitted as part of the course assessment. (more…)
