A presentation of the Lazzaro II project for the preservation of the Italian Interactive Fiction heritage.
Table of Contents
The goal of the Lazzaro II project is the preservation of Interactive Fiction works and assets produced by the Italian community, by filing archival requests on the IF Archive.
The Italian IF community has been very active in the past, producing a significant number of text adventures (both commercial and free) as well as development tools, documentation and translations.
Unfortunately, many of the historical Italian websites that hosted these resources are no longer online, and many of these assets were never archived on the IF Archive. As time passes, the risk of these precious works of IF being lost grows every day more, especially so since the (rather small) Italian IF community that produced this material during the late 80's and 90's is no longer active today as it used it be.
As an attempt to ward this heritage from oblivion, the Lazzaro II project was started — inspired by the Progetto Lazzaro, a similar project which, in the past, organized the revival of early Italian commercial text adventures for the Commodore 64, by contacting the original publishers and gaining permission to redistribute them for playing with C64 emulators.
The Lazzaro II project was started in May 2019 by Tristano Ajmone, a long time IF afficionado and author who has already submitted a number of IF assets to the IF Archive, including third party material.
Hopefully, this project will act as a coordination hub for the archival work, a central place were members of the Italian IF community can discuss, propose and actively work on preparing the assets for archival on the IF Archive. Far from being an officially established representative of the Italian IF community, this project is just an open proposal to which anyone can contribute and join as a peer.
We also hope that by providing a collectively run repository on GitHub, we might simplify the archival work for the IF Archive team, for we're providing a version controlled history of these assets, and a record of the discussions between members of the IF community and the original authors (on the repository Issues), all of which ultimately add up to the spirit of collaborative efforts in the preservation of this heritage, besides providing a trackable history of where the assets proposed to the IF Archive came from.
As the community around the Lazzaro II repository will grow in time, so will its status as a trusted intermediary between the Italian IF scene and the IFTF, filling the linguistic gap and establishing a long lasting relation.
Because of the nature of Copyright, requesting archival of third party assets is always a delicate task. In addition to that, there's the linguistic barrier with Italian assets, requiring a detailed presentation of the original work to be supplied when filing for archival.
From the IF Archive Terms of Use:
The contents of the IF Archive (including donated games, tools, documents, and other material) are the intellectual property of their original creators. They are, where possible, archived and distributed with permission.
Some material on the Archive includes a distribution license (such as an open-source or Creative Commons license). Such material is distributed under its licensed terms. Any material with no attached license is presumed to be licensed for personal use only. [...]
We prefer that material be donated by the original author or someone with the legal right to accept these terms. However, we understand that some IF-related material, particularly from the early years, was distributed with no clear license or terms. We host this material as part of the common heritage of interactive fiction. If you donate work which you did not create, you warrant that, to the best of your knowledge, it may be legitimately stored and distributed by the Archive.
The Lazzaro II project operates in compliance to the above guideline (see also the full Terms of the IF Archive/IFTF), and will do all in its power to find out the license terms of the assets to be submitted to the IF Archive, and try to contact the original author to seek permission when no license is found. Failing that, the best we can do is to provide a description of the context in which the asset was released, take responibility for any misunderstanding, and hope the material gets archived and saved from oblivion.
Many works of IF were distributed freely without any license terms; so on the one hand we know that its author wished to share his/her work with others, but often we are given no clue as to wether this material can also be redistributed by third parties. In the absense of any statement explicitly allowing redistribution, we have to assume that the material was only inteded for download from the publisher's website. But sometimes, we know that the same material was also distributed on other websites, with the original author being aware of this, and we can therefore assume in good faith that he/she approved it.
In most cases, it's safe to assume that the original author wished that his/her work would reach the widest audience possible, that he/she created a text adventure so that others might play it, and that by reviving his/her work we're passing on his/her heritage and fullfilling his/her desire. Although these are reasonable considerations (especially for active members of the Italian IF community, who know each other), when it comes to archiving these works on public services governed by terms of use policies, there are legal considerations to keep in account (unlike, for example, if republishing these works on a personal website).
The goal of this project is to organize the archival of Italian IF assets in a methodic way, by carrying out all the required research, contacting authors and seeking permission. Since we are a small community, and we're still in contact with each other (even in periods of inactivity in terms of IF productions), this is a feasible goal on the long term.
It's important to stress here that our goal is the archival of these assets on the IF Archive, therefore we'll be seeking permission for this specific task — i.e. the fact that the original author has allowed the archival of his/her work on the IF Archive doesn not imply that it might be distributed on other platforms or websites without explicit consent.
Since we sometimes need to slighly edit some assets (usually so with documentation which might need to be ported to another format), we also try to obtain explicit permission to host the original material on the Lazzaro II repository. But in case of ready-to-archive material, this might no be the case at all, and we'll only keep a record on the asset info and archival request, but not the asset itself.
Storing copies of these assets on our repository is never the ultimate goal, but in case of edited assets it might be useful to keep copy of the original unedited assets here, although only the edited version will be proposed to the IF Archive.
We'll always strive to archive all assets in their original form, but sometimes small edits are required to ensure maximum compatibility of the assets with present day technologies.
These are the general guidelines for the Lazzaro II project. As the project will evolve in time, we shall be able to define a more organized workflow on how to organize and plan the recovery of old assets and their archival.
Turin (Italy),
May 2019.