Preserving Complex Digital Objects

Janet Delve is co-leader of the interdisciplinary Future Proof Computing Group in the School of Creative Technologies at the University of Portsmouth. She is a member of the Digital Preservation Coalition Technology Watch Editorial Board. David Anderson is co-leader of the interdisciplinary Future Proof Computing Group at the University of Portsmouth. He is the Director of CiTECH (the Centre for Cultural and Industrial Technologies Research) in the Faculty of Creative and Cultural Industries.

• Foreword - Adam Farquhar Preface - Neil Grindley Introduction - Janet Delve and David Anderson PART 1: WHY AND WHAT TO PRESERVE: CREATIVITY VERSUS PRESERVATION 1. Standing on the shoulders of heavily armed giants – why history matters for game development - Dan Pinchbeck 2. Archaeology versus anthropology: what can truly be preserved? - Richard A. Bartle 3. Make or break? Concerning the value of redundancy as a creative strategy - Simon Biggs 4. Between code and space: the challenges of preserving complex digital creativity in contemporary arts practice - Michael Takeo Magruder PART 2: THE MEMORY INSTITUTION/DATA ARCHIVAL PERSPECTIVE 5. Preservation of digital objects at the Archaeology Data Service - Jenny Mitcham 6. Preserving games for museum collections and public display: the National Videogame Archive - Tom Woolley, James Newman and Iain Simons 7. Bridging the gap in digital art preservation: interdisciplinary reflections on authenticity, longevity and potential collaborations - Perla Innocenti 8. Laying a trail of breadcrumbs – preparing the path for preservation - Drew Baker and David Anderson PART 3: DIGITAL PRESERVATION APPROACHES, PRACTICE AND TOOLS 9. Digital preservation and curation: the danger of overlooking software - Neil Chue Hong 10. How do I know that I have preserved software? - Brian Matthews, Arif Shaon and Esther Conway 11. Digital preservation strategies for visualizations and simulations - Janet Delve, Hugh Denard and William Kilbride 12. The ISDA tools: preserving 3D digital content - Kenton McHenry, Rob Kooper, Luigi Marini and Michael Ondrejcek 13. Ecologies of research and performance: preservation challenges in the London Charter - Hugh Denard 14. A tangled web: metadata and problems in game preservation - Jerome McDonough 15. Metadata for preserving computing environments - Angela Dappert 16. Preserving games environments via TOTEM, KEEP and Bletchley Park - Janet Delve, Dan Pinchbeck and Winfried Bergmeyer 17. Documenting the context of software art works through social theory: towards a vocabulary for context classification - Leo Konstantelos PART 4: CASE STUDIES 18. The Villa of Oplontis: a ‘born-digital’ project - John R. Clarke 19. Preservation of complex cultural heritage objects – a practical Implementation - Daniel Pletinckx.

"This book is an essential resource for anyone engaged with digital preservation activities. It becomes increasingly difficult to focus purely on the preservation of simple digital objects, we have to engage with the complex because developing ICT capabilities provide us with the means to incorporate more and more complexity in the artefacts and genres we create and use. Keeping up to date with advances in digital preservation know-how is challenge enough in itself; bringing together these outputs from the POCOS meetings in a single print resource provides much needed practical assistance. "