You may recall that we recently ran a piece revealing that the Library Of Congress has stepped up to fund preservation of both virtual worlds (such as Second Life) and games, and there's now more info about the project, initially described in a recent IGDA SIG post by Stanford's Henry Lowood.

The project "...will be undertaken by Stanford, U. Maryland, U. Illinois, and Rochester Inst. of Technology. It will start on Jan. 1, 2008 and end at the end of 2009, a two-year project. There are three foci: e-literature (historically, closely related to text games), digital games, and virtual worlds." And helpfully, Andrew Armstrong has posted the proposal [PDF link] to the IGDA's Wiki for greater perusal.

I find it a bit disappointing that it's headed 'How Will We Preserve Virtual Worlds?', with 'games' not mentioned in the title - succumbing to the great frothing desire, in some ways a correct one, that spawned Worlds In Motion and innumerable VC funding fits. But some of the mentioned things to be archived (in addition to various Second Life islands) include SimCity and Adventure - and I too agree that it's a crying shame that there are already online environments that have died without good archiving of user experiences in them. So this is a tremendously encouraging step.