Loading…
Click on Tickets below to register for the conference!

Schedule is subject to change.
Back To Schedule
Wednesday, March 29 • 2:45pm - 3:45pm
Session 4: Emergent Technologies & PDA 1

Log in to save this to your schedule, view media, leave feedback and see who's attending!

Tweet Share
Cogifo Ergo Sum: GifCities & Personal Archives on the Web (Maria Praetzellis & Jefferson Bailey, Internet Archive)

Comparison of Aggregate Tools for Archiving Social Media (Melody Condron)

Video games collectors and archivists: how might private archives influence archival practices (Adam Lefloic Lebel, University of Montreal)

Presentation details:

  • Cogifo Ergo Sum: GifCities & Personal Archives on the Web (Maria Praetzellis & Jefferson Bailey, Internet Archive)

    GeoCities was an early web hosting service, started in 1994, that allowed users to create their own web pages. From personal and family websites to neighborhood and community groups, from creative showcase to memorial sites, the platform hosted over 38 million user-built pages from across the globe and was at one time the third most visited site on the web. Purchased by Yahoo in 1999 for $3.6 billion, the service was eventually shut down in 2009. Prior to closure, the Internet Archive archived as much of the content as possible.

    As part of its 20th anniversary, the Internet Archive build GifCities (http://gifcities.org/), the GeoCities Animated GIF Search Engine, comprising over 4.6 million animated GIFs from the GeoCities web archive. Each GIF links back to the archived GeoCities web page upon which it was originally embedded. The search engine offers a novel, flabbergasting window into what is likely one of the largest aggregations of publicly-accessible archival personal documentary collections. It also provokes a reassessment of how we conceptualize personal archives as being both from the web (as historical encapsulations) and of the web (as networked recontextualization).

    The presentation will describe the project and investigate a number of issues that emerged during its development:

    How do we think of “personal archives” in the era of the web?

    What inventive modes of access are possible when personal archives are engaged as aggregations?

    How can discovery interfaces to aggregations of personal archives repurpose the embedded aesthetics of their origin platforms?

    What is the future of access for born-digital, web-published personal archives?
    What is the mediating role of technologies in personal web-based collections?

    How can web archives help both democratize the historical record of individuals and exponentially scale preservation and access?

    How awesome are early-web GIFs?

  • Comparison of Aggregate Tools for Archiving Social Media (Melody Condron)

    This session will review and compare multiple aggregate third-party tools for archiving social media platforms. Comparison to built in tools for Facebook and Twitter will also be included, as well as suggestions for which tools to use based on the needs of an archival project.

  • Video games collectors and archivists: how might private archives influence archival practices (Adam Lefloic Lebel, University of Montreal)

    Before universities, libraries and museums took interest in video games and started thinking about the preservation of the industry’s heritage, the community of video game players took it upon themselves to preserve their favorite hobby. Projects like the Killer List of Videogames (KLOV), The Cover Project, AtariAge, and World of Spectrum, to name a few, were created by avid independent gamers. Melanie Salwell (2006) mentions that “Retro-gamer groups have developed some important historical and preservation endeavors of considerable significance to game historians.” Passionate amateurs from around the world have developed an expertise that they share among their network. The preservation of video games, both physical and digital, has been the center of their interest; the community has developed techniques and guides to take care of these artifacts. Although some methods are not necessarily the best (and sometimes even be harmful), the newcomer may always find procedures that have been tested and approved by the community.

    This presentation will look at how the video games collectors, who are amateur archivists, preserve video games and compare those procedures with those in archival literature. We will then be able to evaluate the work of these collectors and talk about their usefulness in the whole endeavor that is video games preservation. Are their procedures really improving the long term preservation of the legacy of video games or are the collectors only thinking of their own short-term personal gain? Could the amateurs’ archival techniques help the official archival preservation of video games? Could a cooperative effort between personal and professional archivists be beneficial to preserve the whole heritage of video games? Finally, what would be the best way to both ensure the preservation of those games and their accessibility to game historians and other academics?
Moderators
avatar for Nicholas Taylor

Nicholas Taylor

Deputy Group Leader, Research Library, Los Alamos National Laboratory
Nicholas Taylor is the Deputy Group Leader for Technology Strategy and Services at the Los Alamos National Laboratory Research Library. In this role, he oversees IT research and development efforts focused on digital repository services, applied information science, and system operations... Read More →

Speakers
avatar for Jefferson Bailey

Jefferson Bailey

Director, Archiving & Data Services, Internet Archive
Jefferson Bailey is Director of Web Archiving & Data Services at Internet Archive. Jefferson joined Internet Archive in Summer 2014 and manages Internet Archive’s web archiving services including Archive-It, used by over 900 institutions to preserve the web. He also oversees web... Read More →
avatar for Melody Condron

Melody Condron

University of Houston
Melody Condron is the Resource Description and Management Coordinator at the University of a Houston Libraries. She has presented on a number of PDA topics at multiple conferences and her book on Personal Digital Archiving, Managing the Digital You, was released in March of 2017 from... Read More →
avatar for Adam Lefloic Lebel

Adam Lefloic Lebel

University of Montreal
First contributor: Adam Lefloïc Lebel is a Master student in Game Studies at Université de Montréal. His research interests are related to video games collectors and their archival practices.
avatar for Maria Praetzellis

Maria Praetzellis

Maria is Product Manager for CDL’s research data management initiatives including DMPTool, the FAIR Island Project, and the NSF-funded machine-actionable DMP grant project.

Wednesday March 29, 2017 2:45pm - 3:45pm PDT
Bishop Auditorium Lathrop Library, Stanford University 518 Memorial Way Stanford, CA 94305
  Presentations

Attendees (58)