Digital games are major part of popular culture. They are also an important part of the history of play and as such they deserve to take their rightful place in our cultural legacy. However, they have received little attention in the academic literature on preservation. Despite this lack of interest, some institutions have recognized the significance of preventing the loss of these valuable materials but to what extent is their longevity ensured? What is the current status of game preservation? What are the challenges facing institutions as they ‘‘play games with cultural heritage?’’ This article provides an overview of the current state of play and, using a comparative case study analysis, provides an insight into the issues, which lie ahead.

PurposeThis paper provides a summary of our experiences of setting up an institutional repository at Loughborough University and focuses on some of the key issues we have had to consider, the choices we have made and the challenges we have overcome. MethodologyThe paper outlines the various decision processes involved during the 12-month pilot phase. These include: choosing appropriate software; customising DSpace; implementing licences and gathering content for the repository. FindingsOur experiences highlight some of the challenges involved in setting an institutional repository. ValueThis paper gives a direct insight into the different types of work involved in the setting up of an institutional repository and is an example of a system set up outside the boundaries of project funding.The first year of development (May 2005-April 2006) was seen as a pilot project when members of the IR Steering Committee worked closely with different stakeholders throughout the University to raise interest and gain support for the development of this new service. A librarian's guide to IRs was written by staff at Loughborough (Barwick and Pickton, 2006) and this is available via the IR. By late 2006 the repository contained over 2000 items, including published articles, theses, pre-prints and conference papers and is being indexed by Google, Google Scholar and the Open Archive Initiative harvester and search engine, OAIster. OAIster (http://oaister.umdl.umich.edu/o/oaister/) is hosted by the University of Michigan and contains almost 10 million records from IRs in over 700 institutions. Loughborough is also registered on the Directory of Open Access Repositories (DOAR at http://www.opendoar.org/) which is hosted by the University of Nottingham and Lund University, and the Register of Open Access Repositories (ROAR at http://archives.eprints.org/) which is hosted by the University of Southampton. As evidenced by the entries in these directories many other institutions are involved in setting up IRs. For example, Simpson and Hey (2006) describe developments at Southampton University, Jones and Andrew (2005) outline the work in developing the

This paper sets out the findings of an exploratory study that, drawing on the so-called ‘new sociology of childhood’, has theorised the child as a competent social actor and conjectured that, on this basis, whilst they might lack formal legal capacity, children may nevertheless possess legal capability. Taking a child-first (as opposed to a law-first) approach, the study has sought to assess children's legal understanding using digital gaming as a research tool. We have identified as an area of particular strength children's attitudes to gender equality, and we have determined that many children demonstrate competency to deal with consumer-related issues appropriately. However, at the other extreme, we have established that children demonstrate considerable uncertainty concerning the levels of force that adult authority figures are permitted to exercise over them. We have found in the course of this study that children are competent and willing to express their views on matters that concern them. However, they do not expect to be invited to do this in their day-to-day lives. Related to this we have found a vast lack of awareness among children concerning the rights afforded to them under the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child.

There is a wide range of interest in gamification – with game design elements being used in an increasing number of non-game contexts. Yet, despite these developments, there has been little interest from the academic community in the potential opportunities that gamification presents in the research context. Law in Children’s Lives is an innovative project that has explored the use of a specially designed tablet-based game, Adventures with Lex, as a data collection tool. The game, developed using participatory design techniques, has been used as a means to investigate children’s perceptions of the law in their everyday lives. This article presents a case study of the processes and challenges involved in the development of the game which leads to a discussion of the implications of this study for the wider use of game-based research.