There’s an episode of book shop-based comedy, Black Books, in which Fran, played by Tamsin Greig, starts a new job. She has no idea what her role actually consists of, and yet, somehow, she becomes good at it and delivers a rousing presentation, all while never fully understanding what she has done. Every new research project feels somewhat like this. There are usually continuities from previous projects, but because this one is new there will inevitably be new things you don’t know and how do you find out what you don’t know if you don’t know it?

Fortunately, thanks to the Library’s excellent Web Archiving, Contemporary British and Digital Scholarship teams, I’ve managed to fill in most of those blanks pretty quickly. My name’s Lynda Clark and I’m currently undertaking an AHRC/M3C Innovation Placement embarking on a six-month research project called ‘Emerging Formats: Discovering and Collecting Contemporary British Interactive Fiction’. My primary goals are to get a sense of the ‘shape’ of contemporary British web-based interactive fiction – the kinds of tools British creators are using and the works they are making with them; and to explore how those works might be preserved for future readers and researchers.

Boxes created at a British Library hosted emerging formats project workshop

I’m a maker of interactive fiction myself and have produced a variety of works, often silly (almost always silly, in fact) but sometimes more serious, the most substantial of which was my interactive novella Writers Are Not Strangers, produced as part of my recently submitted creative-critical PhD thesis. Even amongst my own modest back catalogue there is a fair amount of variation in styles, interfaces and tools used, some of which I know will likely scupper the webcrawlers commonly used to archive web-based digital work. Six months isn’t long to find a solution to this challenge, but I’m hoping I can at the very least start to create a record of works to preserve and at least categorically determine what doesn’t work to enable future researchers to move towards what does.

This is where you come in. If you’re a UK-based creator of web-based interactive fiction, please nominate your work for inclusion in the UK Web Archive, where it could (technology permitting) be included in a collection. This will mean the system takes regular ‘snapshots’ of the nominated website and stores them forever! You can make your nominations via the UKWA’s site or by contacting me.

This post is by the Library's Innovation Fellow for Interactive Fiction Lynda Clark, on twitter as @Notagoth. You can find out more about the Library's Emerging Formats project here.