[caseysoftware]

I worked on the project at the Library of Congress that led into the Audiovisual Conservation Center in Culpepper that the article cites. Our sample data was Thomas Edison's first motion pictures, wire spool recordings from WW2, and LPs from the 60s and 70s.

You are correct that it is not a lending library and was not intended to be. The LoC is designed to be a preservation group, closer to a museum than anything else.

Also - you correctly note - about the problems in "preserving" games (or any media) long term is the ability to see or play them. That's one of the problems I was working to solve. And at present, it's still not solved. The only approach we found for media - video, images, audio - was to have a high quality master in a lossless format and then store the original physical media is a safe location free of corrosive materials (like oxygen).

When a better format would come out, you then had the option to convert the high quality master (2nd choice) or to go back to the original preserved media and try to get another master (preferred). Of course, that assumes you preserved the physical media properly...