Conference Agenda

This preservation project investigates the use of virtual machines for the preservation of video games. From MoMA’s collection, Rand and Robyn Miller’s classic adventure game Myst (1993) is used as a sample record to evaluate the performance of three different virtualization options for the Mac OS 9 operating system—SheepShaver, Qemu, and Yale’s Emulation-as-a-Service-Infrastructure (EaaSI). Serving as the control for the experiment, Myst is first documented running natively on an original PowerMac G4 at MoMA. The native performance is then compared with each virtualization software. Finally, a fully configured virtual machine is packaged as a single file and tested in different contemporary computing environments. More generally, this project clarifies the risks and challenges that arise when using virtual machines for the long-term preservation of computer and software-based art.

Social media has enabled an expanded dialogue in the public space. News spread faster than ever, politicians and leaders can communicate directly with a great number of people, and everyone can become an influencer or create a public movement. For the archival institutions and governmental organisations active on different social medias, this creates new challenges and questions. As a consultancy firm working with digital preservation, we couldn’t just ask these questions without also finding some answers. This led to the beginning of developing the system that we today call Arkiwera.

With more than 10 years’ experience of web archiving, we started to look at solutions to preserve posts, including comments and reactions, from different social media platforms about 4-5 years ago. Since we couldn’t find any “out of the box”-solutions that we could just apply and refer our customer to we started to develop our own solution. This has been a long and interesting journey of many lessons learned that we would love to share on the conference connecting to several of the themes presented, e.g. Research, Tools and Access.

Our lecture introduces you to the circumstances offered within the Swedish archival context and the choices we have made from an archival, regulative, and ethical aspect when developing the archival platform Arkiwera – today used by a large number of organisations.