After over two years of wading through the circles of purgatory (as an aside, Purgatorio is definitely my favorite installment of the Divine Comedy), an article that I worked on with Kassidy Hof-Mahoney, a former graduate assistant and now fully-fledged librarian, has been published: “Eastgate Census: Tracking Legacy Literary Software Titles in Libraries, Archives, and Special Collections.” This link is good for free copies of the article, up to 50 clicks, so click away.

This research started from a curiosity I documented in a couple previous posts. Legacy literary software titles from 20+ years ago are still sitting in library collections and, in many cases, are still part of circulating collections, even as the technology required to interact with them has become obsolete. Eastgate has been a pioneering publisher of interactive digital fiction, poetry, and non-fiction for decades, though virtually all of their catalog is inaccessible if you don’t have a 2005 MacBook running an obsolete macOS build:

This situation stands in stark contrast to the kind of media that I’m currently researching — indie games released exclusively as digital downloads through online platforms and storefronts. These games should be easy for libraries to collect and circulate, akin to ebooks, but the lack of a legal framework for providing institutional access to things that are licensed to individual consumers makes this very challenging (for now). Libraries could very easily collect e-lit works released on floppies, CD-ROMs, and (more recently) USB sticks, owning these physical media objects like any other print book on the shelf, but now (most) libraries lack the machines to play this media.

Both situations present challenges impacting the long-term preservation of digital cultural works, though we have a greater means (if not the initiative) to take preservation actions on the legacy physical media objects than we do for the contemporary digital objects that we cannot even collect at present. We at least have the Eastgate CD-ROMs and floppies in our care…even if we aren’t doing much to take care of them.

So this research project was a first step to assess the situation: what’s the extent of Eastgate published e-lit works in library collections? If we know how many copies are out there — and where they are — we can strategize about what steps to take next. I won’t go over the full extent of the findings here (read the paper!), but I’ll share the baseline numbers: there are over 1,000 copies of Eastgate titles in nearly 300 libraries around the world. That’s both kind of a lot (a THOUSAND!) but also not a lot when you dig deeper into the numbers (read the paper!). There are a few very popular titles that libraries have collected many copies of, and there are some far less popular titles that libraries have only collected a handful of copies of. Since we’re talking about 20 year old floppies and optical media, some of those copies probably don’t work anymore. Libraries may also target legacy media for weeding, especially given the move to shrink physical media collections and shift toward digital resources licensed from some commercial vendor that doesn’t have stake in long-term cultural preservation…

So what do we do now? I’ve got some ideas that I discuss in the paper, like transferring legacy media still located in circulating collections to archives/special collections, but I’m also interested in ways to keep this media circulating. What if we circulated 2005 MacBooks running obsolete macOS builds that are preloaded with Eastgate titles? Academic and public libraries could also take a cue from media labs like the Media Archaeology Lab or the Electronic Literature Lab and stock up on legacy machines to play their legacy software. I know there are lots of other hidden collections of CD-ROMs sitting in libraries around the world that could benefit from these efforts, too.

If you’re interested in taking a deeper dive into the census, we’ve also made our data available here: https://zenodo.org/records/10950476.