Textualize Our Role As Information Maintainers in the Stewardship of Born-Digital Media

Best Practices Exchange 2020 Monique Lassere, Plenary

Hi, everyone. Thank you all for having me and for taking the time to attend today’s plenary. First, I’d like to thank the Best Practices Exchange Program Committee for selecting me as this year’s plenary speaker and to Jessica Meyerson for nominating me. While there were many surprises and changes along the way, I’m delighted to get the chance to capture your attention today and speak about the work and research I’ve participated in I believe is critical to a better understanding of labor and the power of digital archives in our profession and our larger society.

Best Practices Exchange 2020 Monique Lassere, Plenary

I was invited to BPE to speak about my participation in the Information Maintainers group and its impact on my work as a trained librarian that specializes in digital preservation and more specifically born-digital archives. The Information Maintainers refers to a community of people who support the maintenance of information and those who manage, maintain, and preserve information systems. This group was borne out of the work that co-directors Lee Vinsel, Andrew Russell, and Jessica Meyerson began with the Maintainer, a global research network interested in the concepts of maintenance, infrastructure, repair, and the many forms of labor and expertise that sustain our world. These groups both aim to interrogate the ways we traditionally interact with technology through community-based engagement and to refocus this relationship on the structures and labor that enable our world to function day to day. My experiences participating in the Information Maintainers community and writing the highly collaborative white paper, “Information Maintenance as a Practice of Care”, have greatly impacted my understanding of our field’s relationship with information and the actions that enable its use. It’s no secret that libraries, archives, and museums struggle to steward the wealth of digital objects in our care and the information they impart. While solutions can be found in technological systems, platforms, and tools, more often than not our field continually encounters first the constraints of poor infrastructure–both organizational and technological– and insufficient labor practices on our way to these solutions. So what then is our responsibility

Best Practices Exchange 2020 Monique Lassere, Plenary as information maintainers to support the steward of information while also sustaining and empowering the people, practices, systems, and infrastructure that enable its use.

Born-Digital Media in our Sociotechnical World As Lee Vinsel and Andrew Russel wrote in their Aeon essay, “Innovation is overvalued. Maintenance often matters,” refocusing our society’s relationship with technology away from innovation and novelty and instead on maintenance and repair allows us to interrogate the structures and practices that enable our sociotechnical world to keep running and the ethical implications of our interaction with technology. While I will be discussing what it takes to sustain born-digital archives programs of work within libraries, archives, and museums today, I’d like to use an anecdote to guide this discussion.

Credit: Screenshot from lgira.mesmer.net

This story emerged through the course of a recent software preservation grant I led at the University of Arizona to preserve born-digital video games stewarded by the Learning Games Initiative Research Archive. The project team stumbled across this story while perusing the Archive’s catalog to choose use cases for our grant project. One of the use cases we settled upon was the Charles Grey game hack collection, a collection of game hacks by Gray 3

Best Practices Exchange 2020 Monique Lassere, Plenary

Games, a video game company specializing in hack and homebrew market games, “making extreme and advanced games for the Atari 2600 system that could have never been created or conceptualized back when the Atari 2600 was a current game system” (AtariCompendium.com). A game hack takes an existing game and modifies it in some way so that it differs from the original. The game at the center of the story I am beginning with today is an original game from which a Grey Games game hack was derived, the well-known, infamous Atari 2600 game, E.T.: the Extra Terrestrial. The purpose of this anecdote acting as our guide for todays’ discussion is manifold. Overall, it highlights the wide-reaching effects of our society’s prioritization of technological innovation over maintenance and in doing so helps contextualize our role as information maintainers in the stewardship of born-digital media.

Credit: Top image from http://bikeacrossamerica.net/tour/14/lascruces-to-alamogordo.htm; Lower left image by CNET at https://www.cnet.com/news/found-ataris-e-t-games-dug-up-from-new-mexico-landfill/; Lower right image from lgira.mesmer.net: E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial. Atari, Inc. (Howard Scott Warshaw). Atari, Inc., 1982. Atari VCS/2600.

In 1983 the videogame company Atari paid the City of Alamogordo, New Mexico to dispose of 800,000 unsold cartridge games in a city landfill. At the time the global videogame market was experiencing a recession due to overproduction and market saturation

Best Practices Exchange 2020 Monique Lassere, Plenary compounded a growing market for personal computers (Wiki). While some media outlets reported on Atari’s decision to dump hundreds of thousands of games in the desert, the burial largely went uncovered by the public and over the next thirty years became an urban legend, with the infamous Atari 2600 game, E.T.: the Extra Terrestrial at the center of it.

Credit: Image 1: https://hiscoga.wordpress.com/video-game-crash-of-1983/; Image 2: http://thedoteaters.com/?attachment_id=2381

Over the years many critics have referred to E.T.: the Extra Terrestrial as one of the worst video games and one of the biggest commercial video game failures ever. Based on and developed in conjunction with the film of the same name, in 1982 Atari thought the game would achieve high-selling figures and with this thinking directed programmer Scott Warshaw to develop the game in just five weeks–compared to the usual six to nine months–so its release could coincide with the film’s. Confidence in sales and expensive licensing led Atari to overproduce game cartridges: while the game sold roughly 1.5 million cartridges and was met with initial commercial success, it achieved low-selling figures due to overproduction with anywhere from 2.5 to 3.5 million cartridges left unsold. The oversupply forced retailers to repeatedly lower the game’s price and millions of cartridges were returned to Atari as unsold merchandise or customer returns. The game’s commercial failure precipitated the video game 5

Best Practices Exchange 2020 Monique Lassere, Plenary company’s fall into debt, facing a $5 million loss from E.T.’s failure alone and became an exemplar of the large-scale global recession in the video game industry from 1983 to 1985. In 2014 a garbage contractor, Joseph Lewandowski–who was on site for the initial burial–bought the garbage company that dumped the games in 1983. Lewandowski was not particularly interested in games himself but was enamored with the urban legend and so led a treasure hunt for the games. While the actual dig and analysis of game content was conducted by a range of actors–from Lewandowski and game enthusiasts to gaming and entertainment companies, Fuel Entertainment and Xbox–the treasure hunt led to the discovery of over 1000 games and about 50 different titles, ranging from best sellers and fan favorites like Pac Man and killer application Star Raiders to the infamous E.T. the Extra Terrestrial.

Credit: Image from https://archaeogaming.files.wordpress.com/2014/11/et8194-ebay.png.

After the games were discovered, over 800 of them were sold through an eBay auction. Profits to the tune of $100,000 went back to various Alamogordo city departments and projects, as well as a historical society. And E.T. the Extra Terrestrial–a game so worthless at its initial release it precipitated a company’s demise–was sold for around $1500. While the city of Alamogordo received a small financial and social benefit from the sale of the landfill videogames, the community was already deemed a dumping ground for technological waste 6

Best Practices Exchange 2020 Monique Lassere, Plenary evidenced by the fact that Alamogordo served as the site for nuclear detonation in the Trinity Test of 1945. The story of the Alamogordo landfill and E.T.: the Extra Terrestrial exemplifies the conventional role born-digital media plays within our society and its impact on local and global communities . In doing so, this story also lays out the wide-ranging network of economic, social, and ethical imperatives or lack of that commonly guide the creation and stewardship of digital objects. In this anecdote we see how our sociotechnical world routinely disadvantages both communities and the environment that are the farthest from nexuses of power. As information maintainers, our role lies not only in supporting the maintenance of information and those who steward information systems, but in doing so to also interrogate the larger questions, structures, and consequences maintenance of this information poses. What rings clear in the story of the Alamogordo landfill is, first, the unmistakable fact that our sociotechnical world is driven by financial incentives by those among us with the means to create and steward. In this way, both the creation of digital media and its inherent properties are similarly guided by first by financial incentives, often in opposition of the ideals we espouse as information maintainers. Atari’s lack of regard for the impact disposing game waste would have on the environment and the people of Alamogordo underscores a widespread ignorance for ethical disposal of digital waste and the tendency for the most disadvantaged amongst us to be most negatively affected by our society’s interactions with technology. Lastly, it underscores the cultural mutability of digital objects in relation to their worth and how the changing course of their meaning and use over time in relation to its function within society.

Best Practices Exchange 2020 Monique Lassere, Plenary

The consequences of our society’s interaction with technology on our profession are manifold, including: Managing a proliferation of digital information objects within our custody As Mark Wolfe outlined in the 2012 Archival Science article on the sustainability of archival practices, a reduction in the production of paper-based information matched with decreasing production costs of digital objects has led to archival acquisition practices that outpace archivists’ ability to manage these records. We must manage a proliferation of digital information and associated objects and systems without the necessary infrastructure or humans to properly steward these objects. The role of the archivist, or the information maintainer, then is to carefully interrogate the value of managing collections or bodies and other instances of digital information against our ability to do so properly.

Grappling with planned obsolescence and limited interoperability: Limited interoperability of the systems and platforms that allow us to manage and interact with digital objects increase the labor that information maintainers must perform to properly steward these objects.

Best Practices Exchange 2020 Monique Lassere, Plenary

Due to the commodification of information through limited interoperability, information maintainers must grapple with an exponential amount of information platforms and systems in order to manage digital objects. The consequences of which are increased strain and labor on our profession. Often technological solutions to the interoperability problem require backwards software development or subscription purchases to proprietary software through which complex digital objects are designed to move. The latter of which is often in direct conflict with the ideals and values espoused by libraries, archives, and museums advocating for open information. In a resource- constrained environment, management of complex digital objects further increases the burden to perform on practitioners that are already over-extended in their digital stewardship responsibilities.

Power dynamics of mainstream media production and stewardship. As information maintainers, we are often left out of the mainstream sphere in which digital media is produced. The story of the Alamogordo landfill highlights the range of individuals and actors that can participate in the evolution of an information object and how they play a role in the repair and maintenance of that object. We also see, in this story, the communities that are left out of decision-making spheres, particularly the Alamagordo community, who undoubtedly have been historically affected by the technological waste the town is known for. While we hold limited power within the sphere of media production, we do hold some control in ensuring we acquire and steward digital information and born-digital media that both aligns with the values we espouse. We see this extensively with community archive initiatives, such as ASU’s Community-Driven Archives Initiative led by Nancy Godoy, which brings the knowledge and tools necessary to preserve family archives to the community for those communities to steward themselves.

Best Practices Exchange 2020 Monique Lassere, Plenary

Credit: Images taken by Monique Lassere.

Information Maintenance within Digital Archives While my role as a practitioner focuses on the preservation of personal digital archives within special collections libraries and archives, the videogames preserved through the course of the FCoP software preservation project share many properties we must consider in the preservation of personal born-digital media archives. Personal digital archives call attention to the unique ethical, social, and technological impacts of stewarding dynamic, user-generated records in addition to the information and stories these archives present. Most of the born-digital games we preserved through the course of the software preservation grant at Arizona were modified games stored on floppy disks. Often the floppy disks also held documents and other personal data generated on home computers. The example of the Charles Grey game hacks underscores the varied materialities born-digital media inhabits, which digital humanists like Johanna Drucker and Matthew Kirschenbaum have written on extensively. The unique issues and problems posed by born-digital archives help us identify the approaches for stewardship.

Best Practices Exchange 2020 Monique Lassere, Plenary

The performative materiality of digital objects and their use is contextualized over time within larger systemic, cultural, and technological spheres. Efforts to account for this contextualization lie both in description and access as preservationists work collectively to set up environments that allow use of complete software and computing environments. Archivists working with born-digital media, due to limited interoperability, often preserve these objects in ways that allow a complete re-rendering of the original information object, through the use of disk images. The forensic materiality of born-digital media by way traditional methods for archiving such media–often referred to as digital forensics–impacts the tools and practices archivists use to process these objects. While the disk image enables maintainers and users to interact with archival digital objects in their original rendering environments, its archival use forces stewards of such media to grapple with a range of personally identifiable and sensitive data: from traditional PII within documents and emails to more nuanced data such as geospatial metadata embedded in images or deleted and hidden files–or data that can only be rendered under specific computational environments. The time to learn such workflows coupled with the processing time necessary to analyze disk images for such data becomes an insurmountable task for many archivists and maintainers in resource-constrained environments. Balancing privacy with authenticity of digital objects is, then, an issue of labor. The distributed materiality of digital objects gives rise to issues in our field providing continued 11

Best Practices Exchange 2020 Monique Lassere, Plenary access and management to such objects. Because of the myriad software and hardware components one digital object may rely on, complete computational environments are routinely necessary to interact with and process digital objects.

Credit: Images (counterclockwise) from lgira.Mesmer.net, softwarepreservation.network, arizona.edu, bitcuratorconsortium.org, themaintainers.org.

A comprehensive understanding of key issues born-digital archives pose allows us to delineate the best approaches for dealing with such issues in the overarching goal to preserve and provide access to these archives. The issues of technology, labor, and infrastructure we experience in digital archives are common across our field. What it takes, first, to maintain digital archives and associated programs of work is community engagement and the existence of safe, accessible spaces to share workflows and recurrent issues experienced in our work. Organizations like the Maintainers, the Software Preservation Network, the Bitcurator Consortium (BCC); practice- focused conferences like BPE, the BitCurators Users Forum, and the Maintainers; and informal working groups are crucial in, first, articulating our work and the intersection of our experiences to, then, secondly delineate common successes and failures that form the bed of best practices. They do so by lowering the barrier for engagement, meeting institutions and 12

Best Practices Exchange 2020 Monique Lassere, Plenary practitioners where they are related to workflow and expertise by providing mechanisms for information-sharing and the technological infrastructure to conduct our work. Sustaining communities in digital archives programs relies on pooling expertise and ability where it exists. In the software preservation grant at University of Arizona, my colleague, Fernando Rios, and I teamed up with co-directors of the game archive, Ken McAllister and Judd Ruggill. We knew at the onset that if we chose to collaborate with an archive with a fuller and more comprehensive collection of dynamic digital objects their strengths would meet and embolden ours related to technological infrastructure. As information maintainers we also hold the responsibility of engaging with the communities, subjects, and users information objects both intersect with. We must also ask what is the impact of our stewardship on local and global communities from ingest to preservation and disposal? In the case of the Alamogordo landfill, proper stewardship of the discarded video games would have entailed a more collaborative, ethical engagement with the Alamogordo community. As librarians, archivists, and information maintainers, we too, must interrogate who our work impacts both positively and negatively while making strides to steward information with care for every party involved.

Credit: Images from digitalintelligence.com; https://wiki.dpconline.org/index.php?title=File:Xray.png; https://guymager.sourceforge.io/ 13

Best Practices Exchange 2020 Monique Lassere, Plenary

While sustaining our practices must be supported by collective, professional engagement, a number of labor issues that inform our practices begin at the institutional level. First, we must right size our practices to our ability to steward digital objects ethically, responsibly, and authentically. As previously mentioned, processing disk images and providing access to whole computational environments is incredibly labor-intensive. Often organizational solutions to this often result in increased labor for existing staff with competing priorities. Increasing the labor that one archivist must do is an organizational misstep that often results in backlogs of fragile, at-risk born-digital media and further in risks of liability that outperform our capacity to deal with them. Sustaining practices begins by providing equitable workplaces with both fair and reasonable duties for staff, in addition to opportunities for professional engagement. Sustainable practices must also include appropriate acquisition and selection policies that enable staff to process those objects in a reasonable amount of time to limit liability. As co-author Jess White and I outlined in our forthcoming JCLIS paper, “Balancing Care and Authenticity in Digital Collections: A radical empathy approach to working with disk images,” we must define the risk of retaining holdings we cannot process and weigh that against our labor as well and the subjects and communities impacted by this risk. We must collect less, define acceptable risk, and allocate staff to ethically steward born-digital materials. Interrogating our practices and aligning them with our values, in the case of digital forensics, depends on a reimagining of the tools we use, which are borrowed from legal enforcement and police spheres of work. Open-source software developers have become crucial in the venture to ensure we ethically process and provide access to born-digital materials and recast these tools to fit our needs in supporting cultural heritage. Take, for example, a Twitter discussion in early 2019 on the use of equipment and software from vendors primarily serving legal enforcement. The discussion began with Eddy Colloton, a Project Conservator at the Hirshhorn Museum, noting, “Lots of GLAM folks (including me) using tools from vendors that primarily service law enforcement. Thinking about forensic bridges and disk imaging software especially. Kinda fucked up right?” The subsequent conversation drew heavily on Elvia Arroyo-Ramirez, Kelly Bolding, Faith Charlton, and Allison Hughes’ work at Princeton, “Tell Us about Your Digital Archives Workstation”: A Survey and Case Study, in which they write, “the company that manufactures FRED machines, Digital 14

Best Practices Exchange 2020 Monique Lassere, Plenary

Intelligence, has a primary customer base not of cultural heritage institutions but law enforcement agencies. The sobering fact that our purchase would indirectly help support the tools of the criminal justice system, and by extension, the prison industrial complex, caused some unease." From this, Elizabeth England, an archivist, stated a desire for functionality in the open-source disk imaging tool, Guymager, to edit or use different metadata fields as opposed to the preset fields, “evidence number” and “examiner.” Within 24 hours, Euan Cochrane, a digital preservationist, and Guy Voncken, Guymager’s developer, had created a solution to change the fields. This interaction perfectly highlights the need for a range of actors, from archivists, curators, and other stewards of born-digital materials to have access and input into the development of software and tools utilized in their work.

Credit: Images from softwarepreservationnetwork.org; screenshot taken by Monique Lassere

Issues of infrastructure routinely outpace small to moderate-sized institutions’ ability to develop and sustain such infrastructure. While it is tempting here to conflate infrastructure with specific technological tools and platforms, refocusing our relationship with technology, and born-digital archives, in particular, towards maintenance elucidates the fact that such tools and systems are but a part of the larger social systems that enable our work.

Best Practices Exchange 2020 Monique Lassere, Plenary

Take for example, the Emulation-as-a-Service Infrastructure project, EaaSi for short, which largely enabled the grant team’s ability to provide access to the preserved videogames. While the EaaSi program of work has focused on the development of technology and services to expand and scale the capabilities of the EaaS sandbox, a tool that allows practitioners to emulate digital objects, it has also enabled and affected a community surrounding this work. This program of work harnesses the strengths of individual academic institutions to develop and support a technology for the community to use. Backed by the Software Preservation Network, of which many of our home institutions support through labor or financial backing, the EaaSi program is supported not just by granting or well-known institutions but also by community-based research and solutions with the goal of generating best practices for any and all stewards of software. What we see here is the partnership and pooling of distributed resources and labor which create the infrastructure for our professional community to do our work within the constraints we experience at our home institutions.

Credit: Images from https://www.polygon.com/2014/11/13/7217949/e-t-cartridges-atari-2600-landfill-ebay-auction

Game enthusiasts that participated in the discovery of the Atari games in the Alamogordo landfill often refer to it as an event of “game archeology”. Digging up the games, in this case, was–to a very limited degree–reparative in many senses: it removed toxic plastics 16

Best Practices Exchange 2020 Monique Lassere, Plenary from the environment, while also lending credence to a story detailing a company’s negligence no one could confirm in the span of thirty years since its inception. It also enabled the creation of the many game hacks we encountered in our grant project, exemplifying how information objects transform over time in response to use and spawning a discussion of the effect of capitalism on videogaming. Comparing this case of game archeology to the work of digital archiving brings to the forefront how acts of repair and reimagining are crucial to information maintenance in born-digital archives. In preserving born-digital archives and other information objects, we must first sustain the day-to-day actions, practices, and people that we have made a commitment to, that make this work possible. The very definition of best practices relies on the sustained ability to do our work responsibly and collectively over time, use cases, and technological, social, and organizational changes. As our sociotechnical world values first the novelty of digital objects, as maintainers we know, understand, and value the larger mechanics, animated by people and practices, that both inform the stewardship of digital objects and are impacted by it. It is in this understanding that we are compelled to act, to sustain, to repair, and to reimagine. Because what happens after innovation, is largely left to us, the work of the maintainers.

Best Practices Exchange 2020 Monique Lassere, Plenary

Citations The Maintainers. “About Us.” Accessed May 17, 2020. http://themaintainers.org/about-us. Atari, Inc. “E.T.: The Extra-Terrestrial.” Atari, Inc. Accessed May 17, 2020. http://lgira.mesmernet.org/items/show/1576. “Atari Video Games Take Plunge Into Concrete.” Sydney Morning Herald, October 3, 1983. https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=1301&dat=19831003&id=jYZWAAAAIBAJ&sj id=0eYDAAAAIBAJ&pg=4157,1731438&hl=en. AtariAge. “AtariAge - Atari 2600 Hacks - E.T. vs. HSW.” Accessed May 17, 2020. https://atariage.com/hack_page.php?SystemID=2600&SoftwareHackID=290#screensho ts. Bureau, US Census. “U.S. Median Household Income Up in 2018 From 2017.” The United States Census Bureau. Accessed May 14, 2020. https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2019/09/us-median-household-income-up-in- 2018-from-2017.html. Google Docs. “Charles Gray Atari 2600 Game Hack Collection.” Accessed May 17, 2020. https://docs.google.com/document/u/2/d/1LCJ3wd4To2X4NJMTAHB0gcIjeLdyO3wsC0 mY0MjA3U0/edit?usp=drive_web&ouid=111413577201446853082&usp=embed_faceb ook. Choi, Taeyoon. “Artificial Advancements.” The New Inquiry, February 9, 2018. https://thenewinquiry.com/artificial-advancements/. “Digital Stewardship: The One with All the Definitions - The Collation.” Accessed May 17, 2020. https://collation.folger.edu/2014/04/digital-stewardship-the-one-with-all-the- definitions/. “DLF Forum 2017: #digipres17 Keynote: Eira Tansey.” Accessed May 17, 2020. https://dlfforum2017.sched.com/event/BztO/digipres17-keynote-eira-tansey. Drucker, Johanna. “Performative Materiality and Theoretical Approaches to Interface.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 007, no. 1 (July 1, 2013). “E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial (Video Game).” In Wikipedia. Atari, Inc., May 9, 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=E.T._the_Extra- Terrestrial_(video_game)&oldid=955781884.

Best Practices Exchange 2020 Monique Lassere, Plenary

“Found! Atari’s E.T. Games Dug up from New Mexico Landfill - CNET.” Accessed May 13, 2020. https://www.cnet.com/news/found-ataris-e-t-games-dug-up-from-new-mexico- landfill/. Geuss, Megan. “881 E.T. Cartridges Buried in New Mexico Desert Sell for $107,930.15 | Ars Technica.” Accessed May 12, 2020. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2015/08/881-e-t- cartridges-buried-in-new-mexico-desert-sell-for-107930-15/. ———. “Landfill Excavation Unearths Years of Crushed Atari Treasure [Updated].” Ars Technica, April 26, 2014. https://arstechnica.com/gaming/2014/04/landfill-excavation- unearths-years-of-crushed-atari-treasure/. Gillespie, Tarleton, Pablo J. Boczkowski, and Kirsten A. Foot. “Rethinking Repair.” In Media Technologies: Essays on Communication, Materiality, and Society, 221–39. MITP, 2013. http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/document/6733973. Hooper, Richard. “The Man Who Made ‘the Worst Video Game in History.’” BBC News, February 22, 2016, sec. Magazine. https://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-35560458. “How E.T. Nearly Destroyed the Video Game Industry.” AllBusiness.Com, June 27, 2013. https://www.allbusiness.com/how-et-the-extra-terrestrial-nearly-destroyed-the-videogame-industry-5049-1.html. “Innovation Is Overvalued. Maintenance Often Matters More | Aeon Essays.” Accessed March 9, 2020. https://aeon.co/essays/innovation-is-overvalued-maintenance-often-matters- more. Kirschenbaum, Matthew. “The .Txtual Condition: Digital Humanities, Born-Digital Archives, and the Future Literary.” DHQ: Digital Humanities Quarterly 7, no. 1 (2013). https://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/7/1/000151/000151.html. Lowry, James. “Radical Empathy, the Imaginary and Affect in (Post)Colonial Records: How to Break out of International Stalemates on Displaced Archives.” Archival Science 19, no. 2 (June 2019): 185–203. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10502-019-09305-z. Mechanisms : New Media and the Forensic Imagination. MIT Press: Cambridge, MA., 2012. Mexican, Dennis CarrollFor The New. “New Health Survey at Nuclear Test Site Details Decades of Illnesses, Deaths.” Santa Fe New Mexican. Accessed March 9, 2020. https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/new-health-survey-at-nuclear- test-site-details-decades-of/article_4cfc0b66-67ae-5a5d-a542-6977b5164e7d.html.

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Mikkelson, David. “Buried Atari Cartridges.” Snopes.com. Accessed May 13, 2020. https://www.snopes.com/fact-check/five-million-et-pieces/. “New Mexico City Finds Buried Treasure of Atari Games.” Accessed May 13, 2020. https://money.cnn.com/2015/09/01/technology/atari-et/index.html. Pierce, Charlie M. The Effects of Radiation and Radioisotopes on the Life Processes: An Annotated Bibliography. U. S. Atomic Energy Commission, Division of Technical Information, 1963. Reinhard, Andrew. “The Capitalism of Late Archaeology: Alamogordo’s Atari Games on Ebay.” Archaeogaming (blog), November 5, 2014. https://archaeogaming.com/2014/11/04/the- capitalism-of-late-archaeology-alamogordos-atari-games-on-ebay/. Robarge, Drew. “From Landfill to Smithsonian Collections: ‘E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial’ Atari 2600 Game.” National Museum of American History (blog), December 15, 2014. https://americanhistory.si.edu/blog/landfill-smithsonian-collections-et-extra-terrestrial- atari-2600-game. Russell, Andrew L., and Lee Vinsel. “After Innovation, Turn to Maintenance.” Technology and Culture 59, no. 1 (May 1, 2018): 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1353/tech.2018.0004. Tansey, Eira. “Archival Adaptation to Climate Change.” Sustainability: Science, Practice and Policy 11, no. 2 (November 2015): 45–56. https://doi.org/10.1080/15487733.2015.11908146. Terdiman, Daniel. “Buried No More! Atari E.T. Games Dug up (Pictures).” CNET. Accessed May 14, 2020. https://www.cnet.com/pictures/buried-no-more-atari-et-games-dug-up- pictures/. ———. “Not so Fast: Environmental Concerns Halt Atari E.T. Cartridge Dig.” CNET. Accessed May 12, 2020. https://www.cnet.com/news/not-so-fast-environmental-concerns-halt- atari-e-t-cartridge-dig/. The Dot Eaters. “The Great Video Game Crash.” Accessed May 17, 2020. http://thedoteaters.com/?bitstory=console/the-great-video-game-crash. The Information Maintainers, D. Olson, J. Meyerson, M. A. Parsons, J. Castro, M. Lassere, D. J. Wright, et al. “Information Maintenance as a Practice of Care,” June 17, 2019. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.3236410.

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Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. “Trinity: ‘The Most Significant Hazard of the Entire Manhattan Project,’” July 15, 2019. https://thebulletin.org/2019/07/trinity-the-most-significant- hazard-of-the-entire-manhattan-project/. “Video Game Crash of 1983.” In Wikipedia, May 9, 2020. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Video_game_crash_of_1983&oldid=9558166 50. Whyte, Jess, and Monique Lassere. “Balancing Care and Authenticity in Digital Collections: A Radical Empathy Approach to Working with Disk Images.” Journal of Critical Library and Information Studies, Forthcoming. Wolfe, Mark. “Beyond ‘Green Buildings:’ Exploring the Effects of Jevons’ Paradox on the Sustainability of Archival Practices.” Archival Science 12, no. 1 (2012): 35–50. http://dx.doi.org.ezp-prod1.hul.harvard.edu/10.1007/s10502-011-9143-4.