The University’s effort to conserve popular culture through video game preservation has not been affected by the school’s budget crisis, though the initial $590,000 grant for the effort will be expended by next month, researchers said.

The program, “Preserving Digital America: Preserving Virtual Worlds,” is concerned with maintaining computer games, video games and other types of interactive fiction that otherwise might disappear as older technologies become obsolete.

The project is part of a larger, $2.15 million venture funded by the Library of Congress that began in 2007 and aims to set standards for video game preservation.

Jerome McDonough, the project’s head researcher and an assistant professor in library and information science, said the University has not provided additional financing for the project.

“The types of works that we’re looking at in our project— games, interactive fiction— the sad reality is we haven’t really been doing much to preserve these works in the first place,” he said. “So, decrease in funds isn’t really having a major impact on the preservation activity that’s going on.”

McDonough said he wants to preserve not only the digital works, but also the information that makes them culturally significant. However, one problem is the limited shelf-life of the hardware. To counter this, the project is looking at ways to provide adequate replacements for the physical video games with programs such as video game emulators.

“One of the fundamental tenants of digital preservation is if you really want to preserve digital material in the long term, you can’t just preserve the work itself,” McDonough said. “You’re going to need to preserve some additional information that allows you to decode the work and make sense of it in the future.”

McDonough said he is testing on an Atari 2600 console that he has on loan from the Undergraduate Library, which keeps a collection of retro games available for both researchers and students.

The consoles are accessible to students at the library’s gaming nights, the next of which is Thursday, April 8.

David Ward, associate professor and assistant undergraduate librarian for reference services, maintains the video game collection at the Undergraduate Library. It includes a Nintendo Entertainment System, a Super NES, a Sega Genesis and several generations of the Atari along with many video game cartridges and discs.

“A lot of it is from donations. Some of these we also started purchasing off of E-Bay, because we wanted to get some of them while they were still possible to be purchased,” Ward said. “Primarily, what we want to use the collection for, because of that, is a source of primary source material for research by campus faculty.”

Though Ward said the games themselves are fragile, they still generate solid connections between video game enthusiasts.

“It (playing video games) definitely influences the way we see the world,” said Paul Keutelian, senior in Engineering. “For instance, all the time I use references from video games to describe something, make jokes with my friends or even to say something without explicitly saying something. It’s through these video games we’re able to communicate this way and have this connection.”