From another mailing list:
I am glad to announce, that a major European research
project, which is related to the preservation of complex digital artefacts, has just
started. KEEP (Keeping Emulation Environments Portable) is
funded by the European
Community with 3,15 Mio. Euro will go on from now for three years. Aim of the project is
to utilize the preservation tools, which are mainly created in the gamer community, for
a broader range of users and purposes. The impact of the project lies also in the
structure of the consortium itself: for the first time traditional memory institutions
like the national libraries of
France, Germany and Netherlands and researchers with a background in humanitities
(University of Portsmouth) come together with organisations specialized in games resp.
their preservation (Computer
Game Museum, European Games Developer Federation ) within a common research effort in such
a scale. I am pretty sure, that we will be able to boost the awareness of the need to
preserve the gaming
culture on that basis and of course provide concrete preservation tools and interfaces to
do the job.