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Our library opens NEXT WEEK! A teaser and more for our patrons
🕑 Added 2025-01-23 19:30:01 +0000 UTCHey, library director Phil Salvador here again! We just announced that we're launching our digital library on January 30! This years-in-the-making project would never have been possible without your support.
You might remember that we originally wanted to open the library in 2024. However, we decided to hold it back a little longer to deal with some outstanding tech issues and improve the user experience. We didn't want to launch the library until we were confident that we were delivering the best version we could.
Since Patreon is our core audience, I wanted to give you some more information about:
Why we pushed things back
What we've done with the extra time
Some of the content we're launching with
First off, let's talk about the technical stuff.
Why we're launching in 2025
Our digital content archive is powered by a platform called Preservica, which preserves our files. It also comes with a public access portal, which is how the public would actually view all the stuff we're preserving. It's a little basic, but it gets the job done.
Our original plan for the last three years is that we would launch the library using Preservica's built-in portal. Then, later down the line, we might be able to build something custom that gives us more flexibility.
We stuck to that plan... until last summer.
DETAILED TECHNICAL TALK BEGINS HERE
Back in July, Preservica made a change to how PDFs get rendered on the portal. Previously, when you tried to view a PDF, it would load as a single, large server request. This meant that if you had an especially big PDF, or if you had a slow connection, your PDF had a good chance of timing out before it finished loading.
To address this, Preservica coded in some custom behavior that changes how document loading works. Instead of loading the PDF all in one go, each page of the PDF gets broken out into separate "documents," which are loaded independently, one page at a time. (If you're familiar with web development, this is called "lazy loading.") From my experience, this did make loading more consistent, especially over mobile.
But this change had huge performance drawbacks. Now, instead of loading a 300-page PDF as a single document, it would load as 600 separate server requests. In our system, magazine scans were now taking upwards of eight minutes to completely load.
That's pretty slow, but it shouldn't be a dealbreaker, right? After all, it takes more than eight minutes to read a 300-page magazine.
Well, if you're doing research with a video game magazine, you're probably not reading it cover-to-cover. More likely, you're searching for a specific game, company, or person. That's why we spent so much time working on OCR, to make sure our magazine collection was actually full-text searchable.
But you can't search a "document" that hasn't loaded yet. Which meant that if you wanted to search through an entire magazine, you had to wait eight minutes for every page to load separately. It was a bad experience.
For the next few months, we worked with the Preservica team to try improving performance. They were able to fix some of the underlying issues, but they couldn't address everything without also undoing the original changes they made back in July.
DETAILED TECHNICAL TALK ENDS HERE
After talking it over, we decided we didn't want to launch the library as it was. Our concern was that if we launched with a bad user experience, people trying to study the history of video games—the people we want using our library!—would bounce off of it and not come back. That just wasn't acceptable.
So we went back to the drawing board, one thing led to another, and...
We rebuilt the entire digital archive interface
Luckily, at the exact same time all this was happening, our volunteer engineer Amanda was antsy to work on a new project. So we made the call to push back launch so she could completely rebuild the public archive portal.
I won't lie that I was reluctant to push back the library any further. I really wanted us to make it by the end of 2024. But when Amanda told us she could build a new portal from the ground up by January, that seemed worth it.
Our main motivation was to fix the PDF search/loading issue. But in the long run, our plan was always to build a custom portal anyway. Now that we were ripping that particular band-aid off, that gave us a chance to add a bunch of features that we had always wanted, in addition to fixing performance issues.
Thanks to the launch delay, we were able to add:
Snippet view! You can actually see where text shows up in the magazine before you search for it! This was the top feature request from our beta testers.
Advanced search and filtering! Now you can search by metadata like subject and date more easily.
Greater control over what materials you see. By default, we've hidden uncataloged digital items (eg., files ripped from CDs) to make search results easier to understand. But if you're a power user, you can toggle them back on. More power to you!
All sorts of usability improvements that you won't even notice!
Even more material that we took the extra time to digitize!
We feel really, really good about where the library is right now. It was 100% worth pushing it back to make this work. And we think you'll like it too.
But now that we've gotten that out of the way, let's talk about...
Our launch collections
For the debut of the library, we've focused on digitizing and cataloging a couple standout collections that we think have high research value and will get people excited.
The big marquee highlight of the library is our collection of game development materials, leading off with the Mark Flitman papers. If you've been paying attention to our work over the last few years, you might've caught a little bit of this story: Mark is a retired game producer who worked for a bunch of major publishers in the 90s and 2000s, including Konami, Acclaim, Midway, and Mindscape. Mark and his family graciously allowed us to digitize the paperwork and backup CDs he kept in basement.
What we have is an incredible record of the business of game-making. In particular, Mark was the producer for a large number of licensed games, and his papers shed a lot of light on the complexity of those projects: reference guides, correspondence, contracts with developers... We can't wait for people to start studying these.
(Above is a picture from a licensing guide for The Simpsons. Mark worked on Simpsons games at multiple companies through his career, and even if you're not interested in classic games like, uh, Virtual Bart, you'd probably still learn something from this guide about how Fox wanted to market The Simpsons during its early years.)
We're also launching with the video collection we digitized from Cyan, developers of the Myst series. We were back up in Spokane last summer visiting Cyan, and we're excited to share that after rummaging around in their storage room, we were able to find and digitize the iconic FMV footage from the first Myst game (above), along with over 100 hours of interviews, filming footage, promotional material, behind-the-scenes videos, and more. It's a collection that tells the story of the company itself.
Even the most diehard Myst fans are going to learn something new here. I know I did!
And of course, we're launching with over 2000 (!) out-of-print video game magazines, which are fully text-searchable, some for the first time ever. There's a lot of rarities in there, like The Cursor (above), a short-lived trade magazine by the International Game Developers Network; or SOE Worlds, covering Sony Online Entertainment's library of MMORPGs.
But wait, there's more! There's so many other cool things, big and small, that we're making accessible at launch. Our favorite is our collection of guidebooks from the Electronic Entertainment Expo. These guides have lists of every booth and project shown off at E3. We've digitized the duplicate copies of these guides that we have from 1995–2006. If you're trying to research an E3 event, this is the most complete record you'll find short of having a time machine.
We also spent time digitizing some of our press kits, brochures, and flyers. Unlike other marketing materials like ads and commercials, these were meant for people who weren't part of the general public, like the press, game stores, or even other game publishers. It's a totally different style of marketing that you might not have seen before, and we think people will really get a kick out of these.
We think we've done something really transformational here: We've turned our physical collections into a powerful research tool. Now that all the pieces are in place, you can search for any game or company or phrase, and our system will find anywhere showed up behind-the-scenes AND in the press!
It's incredible having our collections in conversation with each other like this. No joke, every time we use our library system, we find something new, or we discover a connection we didn't know about before. This is really a one-of-a-kind resource.
All this will be opening to the public in one week. One week! And this is just the start. There will be more and more coming in the future.
Okay, serious mode for a second
We didn't want to launch the library until it met our expectations, and we feel amazing about where we are right now. I cannot wait for everyone to dig into this.
Thank you so much for your support and patience. If we've seemed quiet last year, it's because we've had our heads down getting this thing ready. Your ongoing support for us is the reason we've had the flexibility to keep working on this until we got it to where it is now.
See you again soon!
Comments
Daniel Ciccarello
Awesome!
George Cochran
I'm so excited to see this in action! Now I need to find something I like to use as an e-reader for magazines...
