Here is a quick roundup of the many very interesting projects that came up at our July meeting.

We have become aware of a range of people doing some great work and took the opportunity to honour them with a mention, like Nick Marentes’ beautiful documentation of his TRS-80 games here. Andrew Trotman keeps the Poly archives here. For those who don’t know, the Poly was a NZ computer that was designed for educational use in the early 1980s. We discussed an issue that’s come up from one of the supporters of the Australasian Heritage Software Database around where the first local internet domain names should go. Pandora was our initial response, but will probe this further.

On the technical side, we’ve come across these very useful sites: http://wiki.opf-labs.org/display/REQ/Digital+Preservation+and+Data+Curation+Requirements+and+Solutions and . Plus there was a discussion on the LoC blog about where applied digital preservation research is happening and, by extension, what research it would be useful to undertake.

Several interesting projects to do with artist work were mentioned — the New Museum’s XFR-STN.
The other one is the Bay Area Video Coalition which is reaching out to artists and arts and heritage institutions to preserve cultural knowledge. It primarily focuses on analog to digital preservation, but the overall goal of preserving artistic heritage parallels the XFR-STN project.

Finally, we discussed the inevitable (some would say) shift in hardware and experience associated with preservation and viewed some photos of the MoMA show “Applied Design” where 14 games are shown in a way that highlights their interaction design rather than pay homage to their cabinetry or other hardware.  This led to mention of Melanie’s forthcoming presentation of a paper at the Art History of Games conference entitled “Moving on from the Original Experience”, which is available here.

Thanks all for coming.  We hope to see you — and some new faces — next time, which will likely be in October.  Several of us will be at the Australasian Interactive Entertainment conference in Melbourne at the end of September where the theme is “matters of life and death”.  Look for the launch announcements of the Popular Memory Archive, which will appear around then too.