Cabrinety Video Game Licensing
VIDEO GAME LICENSING FOR DIGITAL PRESERVATION
Digital Archivist | January - May 2021
From January-May 2021, I worked as a digital preservation archivist on the Cabrinety Project for Stanford University Libraries as part of my final Capstone project for my MLIS at the University of Washington.
Background
The Cabrinety Project is a collaborative large-scale digital preservation effort between Stanford University Libraries (SUL) and NIST (National Institute of Standards and Technology) to create forensic disk images and high-resolution photographic scans of materials in the software series of the Stephen M. Cabrinety Collection in the History of Microcomputing, ca. 1975-1995. The software series exceeds 700 linear feet, includes more than 18,000 unique software packages, and contains dozens of media formats (such as floppy disks, computer cassettes, and game cartridges.) In order to preserve the content of the collection, SUL teamed up with NIST to create forensic disk images and checksums of all the media items in each Cabrinety software package. SUL handles re-processing of the Cabrinety collection, creates item-level registration and metadata records for each software package, captures high-resolution photographic scans of all physical materials, and handles tracking and logistical details as collection boxes are shipped cross-country between SUL and NIST. Once the Cabrinety-NIST Project is complete all the photographic scans, forensic disk images, and checksums will be ingested into the Stanford Digital Repository for long-term preservation.
Project plan
My role in the project was to assist the digital preservation team by sending out permission agreements for the digital media items in the collection. My intitial task was to analyze the existing qualitative data. Based on the metadata generated when the Cabrinety collection was first digitized, I ran an analysis using Python to filter out and unify duplicate or alternate publisher names. Then I generated a count of each occurence of each publisher name. This ranking of which publisher owned the rights to the highest volume of video games in the collection allowed me to determine where I should start with contacting rights holders. Next, I worked to conflate rights holders with similar names or whose company’s assets were bought or sold to another company. Then, I searched for an appropriate contact to send the permission agreement to. Based off the response from the right’s holder, this determined the level of access each digital item had in the collection. Rights holders could choose to grant one of the following types of access: universal access, research-only access, or no permission to access. If the point of contact no longer owns the rights, they could also note this in their response. I tracked copyright holders, copyright contact information, and responses from copyright holders.
Copyright Permissions
To obtain copyright permission, permission letters had to be mailed out to the rights holders. I encountered three different types of issues when identifying rights holders: the rights holder was a now defunct game company, the rights were owned by a single person who I could not find contact info for or who may have passed away, or the games company who was the rights holder could not provide sufficient documentation to grant the permissions I was seeking. This issue arose primarily because of the age of the collection, and an industry where rights holders often shift hands because company's are bought and sold.
