European Directory of Creative Computing Preservation Initiatives

Background

As part of the COST GRADE project we are developing an European Directory of Creative Computing Preservation Initiatives. We hope that this list will help bring greater visibility to the many passionate initiatives working across Europe towards safeguarding born-digital heritage. Not only to preserve hardware and software but also to record the histories of the people that shaped them and the communities they built together.

We use the term creative computing (more information here) to bring together a wide range of practices and communities related to computer art, the demoscene, digital privacy, electronic music, hacking, retrogaming, right to repair and video games.

Submissions

We are looking for initiatives located in Europe*, such as museums, exhibitions, dedicated non-profit organizations, restoration projects, digital archives and more. To make a submission, please provide the following publicly available information:

The full name of the initiative.
The country of origin of the initiative.
The city/address where the initiative is located (if possible).
A link to the initiative’s website or social media account.

*For the purpose of this directory, we are interested in all European countries, as well as COST Full Member countries.

Submission form (one form = one initiative)

PRIVACY NOTE

This form does not collect any confidential, sensitive, or non-public data.The information submitted through this form will be reviewed by the GRADE team and may be published as part of the Directory on GRADE’s website, as well as distributed in open repositories, such as the Wikimedia Commons. Please, provide only information that may be treated as public and displayed in such a repository. Thank you!

In case of any questions you can contact the GRADE team directly at: info@costgrade.eu.

Progress

You can see the current progress here Let’s call it early pre-alpha 🙂 Categorization (see Annex below) is done by the Directory team with GRADE network members acting as national experts.

The final product will be also available on GRADE Wikibase as a public resource. More information in the coming weeks!

Special thanks

We would like to extend our sincere thanks to the dedicated retrogaming community members who created existing local maps of video game heritage initiatives that served as a foundational resource for our European directory.

Retrogralnia (Wrocław, Poland) – https://retrogaming.space/

MO5 (Paris, France) – Digital patrimony preservation projects

EFGAMP – Member list

Wikipedia – List of video game museums, List of computer museums

ArcadeHry (Červený Újezd, Czechia) – Arcade Museum Europe

Directory Team

Aleksandra Prokopek, Jagiellonian University, Poland

Maria B. Garda, University of Turku, Finland

Paweł Grabarczyk, IT University of Copenhagen, Denmark

Vojtěch Straka, Czechoslovak Game Archive, Czechia

Gaja Zornada, Computer History Museum, Slovenia

Annex. Data-set categorization (in progress)

ORIGIN:

Private – first spark came from grassroots (e.g. Računalniški muzej)

Hybrid – both grassroots and public actors involved (e.g. Suomen pelimuseo)

Public – first spark came from a public institution (e.g. CKINI Łódź)

LEGAL STATUS:

Informal – not registered as a legal entity

Registered – registered as a legal entity

ACCESSIBILITY:

Local – communication only in the national language

International – communication in more than one language, or in English, French, Spanish, Russian (as per se international)

LAST ACTIVE (OPERATIONAL STATUS)

We start by adding the date of the last last-recorded activity (e.g. on website or social media): XXXX-YY-ZZ,
Following data collection in mid-October, threshold criteria for active, dormant, and discontinued statuses will be established based on the temporal distribution of last-recorded activity across the dataset.