Interview with Stella Wisdom, Digital Curator at the British Library

The British Library's engagement with video games and emerging digital formats traces back to a 2012 preservation symposium, where digital curator Stella Wisdom and colleagues conceived the Off the Map student game-making competition. Running for five years, the competition invited students to build games from the Library's digitized maps, texts, and illustrations. Its first winner, Pudding Lane Productions from De Montfort University, used seventeenth-century London views to create explorable streets, and press coverage, including BBC Click, prompted senior management to formally expand the Library's focus on games and emerging formats. Notably, the Library had not previously collected games, so this initiative marked a significant shift in its collecting and programming priorities.

The program broadened considerably after the 2014 collaboration with Crytek and the 2014 Gothic-themed winner Nix, which reconstructed the demolished Fonthill Abbey in virtual reality. Subsequent activities included the Imaginary Cities exhibition, the UK Web Archive's collection of interactive narratives, work with Inkle to preserve the game 80 Days, and hosting the AdventureX narrative games convention, which sold out in 2018 and 2019. These initiatives illustrate how heritage collections can generate new creative and research outputs, while also engaging younger audiences through activities such as Minecraft-based Litcraft workshops.

Despite this progress, the Library acknowledges that it is still developing scalable methods for collecting and preserving interactive and game works, and it collaborates with peer cultural heritage organizations to produce contextual materials. Wisdom presents this work as both professionally rewarding and essential to keeping libraries relevant in a digital environment. The Library's collections are estimated at 170 million items, and she co-supervises four AHRC-funded collaborative PhD students researching mobile storytelling, interactive reading, and digital comics. Prospective collaborators are advised to engage curators early, given the Library's lengthy partnership lead times.