The latest issue of the German journal SPIEL (Siegener periodical for International Empirical Literature Study) gathers articles discussing how electronic literature, digital art and other born-digital genres can be archived. (Scroll down for English when you follow that link.) Unfortunately the issue isn’t online (perhaps it will be easier to archive it on paper) but many of the articles look interesting. The Electronic Literature Collection is discussed by Scott Rettberg, the Electronic Literature Directory by Joe Tabbi. The restoration (and thus, reeappearance) of an early piece by Olia Lialina, Agatha Appears, is discussed by Elzbieta Wysocka. Simon Biggs, a collaborator in the ELMCIP project, has an article with the somewhat disheartening title “Publish and Die”, which is about the preservation of digital literature in the UK. Hans Kristian Rustad writes about Nordic electronic literature, and Patricia Tomaszek, who is a PhD candidate at our department, has an article titled “Reading, Describing, and Evaluating Electronic Literature of Archiving. There are also a number of interesting-looking articles in German.

There are several interesting collections of articles out from Siegen, and if you’re interested in electronic literature, I’d recommend having a look and asking your library to buy them.