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Dancing with the ALA Stars

JABBARroy
Originally uploaded by ALA - The American Library Association

You can see more pictures from Midwinter on the main ALA Flickr account, including my second favorite photo.

In doing research for my LTR, I came across some sites for specific gaming audiences, so I thought I’d share them here, just to give a sense of how pervasve gaming truly has become. I was so pressed for space in the new format that unfortunately, none of these made it into the final manuscript.

• Hide and Seek - “Hide and Seek is a version of the popular real world game. In this game, one player has to hide in a MSN Virtual Earth map and the other one has to find him. To make it easier to find the other player can ask some questions with Yes/No answer. If the player who is hidden in the map doesn’t know the answer, he can use MSN Search in the same game to search the Web.”
• ClickGamer - “Clickgamer is the world’s fastest growing mobile games D2C portal for a variety of hand held devices including Windows Mobile, Symbian Smartphone, PALM, J2ME, RIM Blackberry, iPod and PSP. We stock only the best games and deliver them directly to the customer’s mobile phone and/or PC and MAC.”

  Tangent for Aaron: I can buy Linerider for my Treo!

• Lesbian Gamers - “Lesbian Gamers is about one thing lesbians that play video games. There are loads of lesbian gamers out there and that’s why we’ve started lesbian gamers.com. We’ll be covering stories of interest to lesbian gamers. All done with a little twist of tongue in cheek humor.”
• Gamer Dad - “Welcome to the GamerDad community and website! What you’ll find here is a mix of mainstream parents who are generally clueless about games and looking for help and hardcore gamers who have started families without putting aside the gamepad and their favorite geek pursuits. There’s nothing wrong with that! The average video gamer is now 29 years old (according to the Entertainment Software Association) and, lets face it, if you’ve never played a video game, this stuff is hard to figure out.”

  I was already quite familiar with this site, but I want to highlight it because it’s so useful, especially for non-gamer parents and librarians. They’ve also just debunked the 2007 Mediawise Videogame Report Card, something that needed doing that I just didn’t have the time to do when it came out. Resources available here include a videogame review archive and a blog to help you stay current. Don’t be fooled by the title, as there are gamermoms here, too.

• Literature Inspired Games database from MobyGames - “Games based off works of literature, previously published, and characters from those works. This can include novels and short stories, published in books, magazines, in e-books or even online as text.”

  These are computer- and console-based games, both modern and classic. This one came from a reader, although now I can’t find how the person notified me about it. If this was you, thanks!

• Second Life Games - “The Second Life Games blog started out being strictly about games in the virtual world of Second Life. It’s grown a bit. We get art shows, dip a bit into Web 2.0 stuff, and even take a look at Alternate Reality Games. Basically, if it’s an unusual way to play, I feature it here. Oh, and we love indy game creators.”

  At a dinner during Midwinter, a few of us involved in a new ALA grant (more details about that coming soon) debated whether Second Life is a game or not. As a result, the discussion turned to “what is a game,” which is an ongoing conversation within our group. This site, however, is the middle ground.

In my previous job, one of my tasks was to create authentication scripts for remote access to databases for my libraries. This was something I proactively pursued because most of my libraries didn’t have a programmer on staff who knew how to create these scripts, let alone a server to run them on. Now that I’m not there anymore, those scripts are no longer available, and it’s upsetting to think that those libraries can no longer offer that service to their patrons.

But some vendors are starting to understand that helping libraries increase usage of the databases they’re purchasing is not just a good thing to do but is good business, as well. RSS is a great step in that direction, so I’ve been more than happy to highlight ProQuest’s and EBSCO’s efforts, and I was gratified to learn recently that OCLC is working on providing RSS from WorldCat and FirstSearch (via a message in Facebook).

Another promising step in this direction is the new ProQuest Search Widget creator, a tool that gives subscribers the code to add search boxes to any web page. You can specify a database to be searched, include your proxy server’s address, add specific terms to the search for automatic “and” functionality, and even change the color and border of the box.

When the user enters a search term, if they’re within an authenticated IP range or using your proxy server (if you have one), they’ll get right to the search results. If not, they’ll be prompted to log in.

Tip: If you know a little HTML, you can include the ProQuest logo in the code by default and then change it to be your own logo afterwards if you want to add the search box to non-library pages.

Speaking of where you could put this widget, ProQuest gives you some ideas and even provides some mock-ups as suggestions, but the general idea is to put it anywhere and everywhere your users may be. In some of the example screenshots, you can see how nicely the search box complements an RSS feed of new, subject-specific items from the database. The examples are all for an academic library, but this works just as well for school libraries (classroom project pages), public libraries (municipality sites, park district pages, parent network pages), and even special libraries (intranets). Add in your library’s logo, and you have a fairly simple, yet powerful, way to get your services off your site and into the intertubes your users are using.

Sidenote: After almost three years of promises, ProQuest is finally scheduled to roll out RSS in April. Finally, but hooray!

Recently, Michel Le Querrec friended me on Flickr. I’m not sure why, maybe to extend the reach of the project he’s working on using the site, Photos Normandie. Apparently the National Archives of Canada (and the U.S.?) are uploading pictures from the Battle of Normandy, more than 2700 of them to date.

I found the photographs fascinating, even though the captions and descriptions are in French, so I friended the site back, and now every day I see a few of these amazing pictures mixed into my photostream. It’s very strange to see thumbnails of dogs, nature, friends, children, libraries, and then the Battle of Normandy, but I find it an interesting use of Flickr and the images usually force me to reflect on how lucky I am in this day and age. For some, it would be interesting to add in streams from Iraq, Kenya, and other places that would bring home the reality of the rest of the world, especially in a classroom setting.

All of which was broiling in the back of my mind when I saw this incredible announcement from the Library of Congress, an institution I have to say I never thought would take this step.

My Friend Flickr: A Match Made in Photo Heaven

“If all goes according to plan, the project will help address at least two major challenges: how to ensure better and better access to our collections, and how to ensure that we have the best possible information about those collections for the benefit of researchers and posterity. In many senses, we are looking to enhance our metadata (one of those Web 2.0 buzzwords that 90 percent of our readers could probably explain better than me).

The project is beginning somewhat modestly, but we hope to learn a lot from it. Out of some 14 million prints, photographs and other visual materials at the Library of Congress, more than 3,000 photos from two of our most popular collections are being made available on our new Flickr page, to include only images for which no copyright restrictions are known to exist.

The real magic comes when the power of the Flickr community takes over. We want people to tag, comment and make notes on the images, just like any other Flickr photo, which will benefit not only the community but also the collections themselves. For instance, many photos are missing key caption information such as where the photo was taken and who is pictured. If such information is collected via Flickr members, it can potentially enhance the quality of the bibliographic records for the images.

We’re also very excited that, as part of this pilot, Flickr has created a new publication model for publicly held photographic collections called “The Commons.” Flickr hopes—as do we—that the project will eventually capture the imagination and involvement of other public institutions, as well.

From the Library’s perspective, this pilot project is a statement about the power of the Web and user communities to help people better acquire information, knowledge and—most importantly—wisdom. One of our goals, frankly, is to learn as much as we can about that power simply through the process of making constructive use of it.” [Library of Congress Blog]

More info is available here, here, and here. Major kudos to LOC for seeing the opportunity and seizing it. Hopefully the community will respond and help tag the images for retrieval, but it will be an interesting experiment either way. I am very impressed with this effort and can’t wait to watch it grow.

Photorealism Inside a Virtual World?
Originally uploaded by cogdogblog

My head hurts from thinking about this, but damn it’s cool.

The “Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Spotlight” area at ALA’s Midwinter Meeting was very successful. We had a pretty steady stream of folks watching and playing videogames. I’d be a rich woman if I sold gaming equipment on commission at these things (hint, Nintendo, hint).

This year, the setup was in the registration hall, rather than in a booth on the exhibit floor, so we got a couple of members to help cover the area. Big thanks to Chad Haefele and Matt Roach for doing such a great job.

So great, in fact, that Chad scored a starring role in Philly.com’s coverage of the Meeting on their website (although they did spell his last name incorrectly - sorry, Chad).

Thanks to everyone who stopped by the spotlight and helped us have so much fun. We’ll see you at Annual in Anaheim when we do it again (along with the big game!).

Bonus: The paper also included an editorial about videogames in libraries by ALA President Loriene Roy.

…might just be based on the Nintendo Wii?

Check out Johnny Chung Lee’s Wii Projects and count how many times you find yourself saying “wow.” And if you own a Wii, see if you don’t want to try to doing all of these things yourself. I know I do.

Unintended consequences are often the most interesting ones. As I watched these videos, I found myself thinking about Allan Kleiman’s work at the Old Bridge Public Library, using the Wii to introduce seniors to technology, wondering if this type of setup would work better for those folks who have trouble using a computer mouse.

The head tracking video is really interesting, too, as it might be a precursor to a home version of The Cave. Imagine being able to walk into a book on your videogame console (Hotel Dusk for the Wii, anyone?). 3D gaming - and the literacies that would come with it - might be much closer than we think.

I really want some time to play with this stuff! [Thanks, Clare!]

BookChase

“Bookchase® is exactly what it says - a chase with books.

Bookchase® is also the world’s first board game about books which comes with your own bookshelf, library card, bookshop, and your own set of tiny books to collect. First one to collect six books and head home wins! Simple really.

Bookchase® is a family game which can also be played by adults and is designed for anyone from 5 years upwards. Never read a book? - you could still win. Read all the books in the world? You could still lose. Dare you take the Bookchase® challenge?…

You can get your books in lots of ways - by answering questions, visiting the Bookchase® shop or Library. Or perhaps it’s your birthday and one of the other players would like to give you one of their books as a present. You can even find books on the Bookchase® board. Be careful though, you might drop your book in the bath and be forced to leave it on Treasure Island to dry out! However many players start you can never be certain who is going to win.” [via kimbooktu]

Check out the new Tame the Web on WordPress, along with new URLs for RSS feeds. Be sure to resubscribe.

Check out the new discussion forums Rachel Singer Gordon has started over on LISjobs.

“LISjobs.com, the largest free library career portal on the Internet, is pleased to announce the launch of its new online community for librarians. Devoted entirely to career development and job hunting, these forums provide a space for librarians, LIS students, library workers, and information professionals to discuss professional development issues.”

The current forum topics cover LIS schools, jumpstarting your career, professional development and participation, talking tenure, professional writing, and work/life balance.

In other news, American Libraries has started its own discussion forum based on content from the magazine and other ALA topics, so the LISjobs forums make a nice complement. Together, these are two great places to connect with your colleagues. Thanks for providing this service, Rachel.

The LTR update on gaming in libraries is just about done, and I’ve been reading some fascinating articles and books as background for it. I’ve been wanting to read Susan Gibbons’ 2007 book The Academic Library and the Net Gen Student and this gave me the excuse because there is a chapter devoted to online gaming. Gibbons focuses solely on Massive Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games (MMORPGs), which at first seems a little strange for an academic librarian. However, she explains what these games are, provides a little history about them, gives some information about how NetGens use them, and then brainstorms some ideas for their relevance to academic libraries. I’d argue it’s good reading for folks in *all* types of libraries.

Given some of the negative comments I’ve gotten here about gaming in libraries, including how it will devalue the MLS, I really enjoyed the following history from Gibbons.

“In the late 1700s, parents were warned to protect their children from the many dangers of free access to ‘romances, novels, and plays [which] poisoned the mind and corrupted the morals of many a promising youth’ (Reverend Enos Hitchcock, Memoirs of the Bloomsgrove Family, quoted in Standage 2006, 114). The early twentieth century witnessed the scourge of ‘moving pictures’ because of which ‘God alone knows how many are leading dissolute lives’ (from The Annual Report of the New York Society for the Presentation of Cruelty to Children, quoted in Standage 2006, 114). Or how about the evils of the telephone, which causes laziness, the tendency for crime caused by reading comic books, or the sins of the waltz, with its “voluptuous intertwining of the limbs, and close compressure of the bodies’ (from Times of London, 1816, quoted in Standage 2006, 114). The pattern is clear: the new form of entertainment of the younger generation is misunderstood and portrayed as the ’scourge of society’ by the preceding generations.

Brown suggests that many of us miss the importance of online gaming because we focus too tightly on the game itself: ‘So don’t just think about the games themselves–the content–but about the knowledge ecologies developing around these games–the context’ (2002, 64). The knowledge ecologies of online games include conversations, reading, writing, research, buying and selling, the formation and dissolution of partnerships and pacts, mentoring, instruction, and a host of other activities. The games do little more than provide a compelling and immersive platform for all of these social activities to occur.” (p.34)

Gibbons has clearly spent time studying and thinking about about how the reference desk could incorporate some of the best features of MMORPGs (I’m hoping I have enough room in the LTR to include a mention of these provocative ideas). She is clearly being proactive, rather than simply reactive (especially in a knee-jerk way).

If I’m going to be responsible for the end of the world because I advocate for gaming in libraries, it’s nice to know I’m in such good company.

From my Dad: I Do Dog Tricks. Type in as many commands as you can think of, leaving “kiss” for last.

Happy Holidays, everyone!

My wonder twin buddy Andy has an article in the inaugural issue of The Code4Lib Journal, a publication that arose out of the Code4Lib conference and community. Andy does a lot of work to digitize and make information about the historic Pullman district in Chicago available online, almost entirely as a labor of love and with no real financial or administrative support. To me, he is an unsung hero of the digital world, and I am proud to call him my friend.

Connecting the Real to the Representational: Historical Demographic Data in the Town of Pullman, 1880-1940

“The Pullman House History Project is a part of the Pullman State Historic Site’s virtual museum and web site (http://www.pullman-museum.org/) which links together census, city directory, and telephone directory information to describe the people who lived in the town of Pullman, Illinois between 1881 and 1940. This demographic data is linked through a database/XML record system to online maps and Perl programs that allow the data to be represented in various useful combinations. This article describes the structure of the database and XML records, as well as the methods and code used to link the parts together and display the data.”

The Joy of Tech covers Guitar Hero. [Thanks, James!]

Please go play FreeRice right now. It’s a great example of using gaming for some serious good.

• Click on the answer that best defines the word.
• If you get it right, you get a harder word. If wrong, you get an easier word.
• For each word you get right, we donate 20 grains of rice to the United Nations World Food Program.

“FreeRice has a custom database containing thousands of words at varying degrees of difficulty. There are words appropriate for people just learning English and words that will challenge the most scholarly professors. In between are thousands of words for students, business people, homemakers, doctors, truck drivers, retired people… everyone!

FreeRice automatically adjusts to your level of vocabulary. It starts by giving you words at different levels of difficulty and then, based on how you do, assigns you an approximate starting level. You then determine a more exact level for yourself as you play. When you get a word wrong, you go to an easier level. When you get three words in a row right, you go to a harder level. This one-to-three ratio is best for keeping you at the ‘outer fringe’ of your vocabulary, where learning can take place.

There are 50 levels in all, but it is rare for people to get above level 48.”

From Scott Nicholson, comes the call:

“Attention ALA Members!

We are hoping to go to ALA Midwinter with 100 signatures of ALA members to start a Member Interest Group on Games and Gaming. There are several initiatives across the ALA organization to look at gaming and our hope is to create a group to provide a place to talk about gaming across demographics and library types.

The charge of the interest group is:
To engage those interested in games and gaming activities in libraries and to collaborate with ALA units to support gaming initiatives and programs across the Association. Games, as defined in their broadest sense to include traditional and modern board, card, video, mobile, computer, live-action, roleplaying and miniature games, and gaming activities, including planning and running gaming programs, providing games for informal play, developing a game collection, creating games, development of information and other literacies through games and partnering with other community organizations to support gaming, will be topics for professional exploration. This group is open to all members.

If you are willing to help start this group, print out the petition below and collect signatures and member numbers of ALA members in your organization, and send it to the address on the form in the next few weeks.

The form is at http://boardgameswithscott.com/ggmig.pdf..”

Judi is a student in Dominican University’s GSLIS program who is graduating in January (yay, Judi!). She’s writing her final research paper on gaming in public libraries, and she’s asking library staff offering said programs to fill out a brief survey. If you can help her, please do.

Dear O’Hare Airport,

One of the nicest and most useful things you could do for those of us who pass through your airport (especially regularly) is add more power outlets. Everywhere. Blanket the gates in outlets, and make sure they’re working. Please. Even your own security guards could use them.

Thanks so much,
Jenny

cc: all airports, all libraries

Karen Markey is a faculty member in the School of Information at the University of Michigan. Earlier this year, she received a small grant from the Delmas Foundation to build a prototype online board game that teaches students information-literacy skills. Her game prototype is now fully operational and is being tested and evaluated by a class of 75 undergraduates at the University of Michigan.

They’ve just finished conducting interviews with student game players, but they haven’t had sufficient time to mull over interview data and analyze game play logs. They already recognize that the incentive for playing the game is a critical issue and future games must be intimately connected to a class assignment or project.

Because Karen wants to do something that would scale beyond Michigan, she is looking for research partners at public or academic libraries who are interested in building on her foundation, expanding what they have already done, and testing her approach with their library patrons. Her intent is to find libraries who want to collaborate on an IMLS National Leadership grant to host a unique instance of the game that is customized to achieving their information literacy objectives.

The game is based on the “search strategy” model that Tom Kirk and his Earlham College colleagues devised to teach undergraduates how to do library research. Karen chose the “Black Death” for the prototype game’s topic, and they are learning from their evaluation other topics that college-age students prefer.

Here are some links to learn more about their approach:

1. Information on their Storygame Project generally: http://www.si.umich.edu/~ylime/storygame.html
2. Playing-the-game video at YouTube: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=u76tW-ne-yY
3. Manual for playing the game: http://ics.umflint.edu:3904/manual/manual.html

If you’re interested in partnering with Karen, you can contact her at ylime [ at ] umich.edu. I can’t wait to hear more about this project and watch it develop.

“Copy and paste” is becoming a more frequently used tool to build websites as online services continue to offer their services and content for use anywhere, not just on their own pages. As I show in presentations, these days you can build a very decent community site using either RSS or “copy and paste” (see a proof of concept I built around the La Grange Park Public Library almost two years ago).

It’s a different way of thinking for libraries, that we can actually integrate external content and services into our sites, not just link to them, but the world around us is changing and everyone else is mashing up. It’s not just the growing unstickiness and promiscuity of bits and bytes but also the disintermediation of content and the fact that people want to - and now can - get a particular piece of something, not just the whole. Again, a different concept for online library services.

So, in this type of environment, what services make good mash partners for libraries? Who do we want to play spin the bottle with?

The first time I saw MeeboMe, it seemed like an obvious candidate. Integration in library websites as a cheap (read: free), lightweight reference chat client was a no-brainer. I’ve highlighted libraries that provide links to live help in their catalogs, especially ones that are based on what our patrons use, instant messaging. Using MeeboMe for this type of services offers two advantages:

1. The user doesn’t need to have IM software installed.
2. MeeboMe offers the equivalent of web voicemail, allowing the patron to “leave a message” if the library is closed.

So I’ve been wondering if a library would add this service to its catalog, but because there is sometimes a lag in either page loading or chat window loading with the Meebo widgets, I wasn’t sure how feasible this is. Plus, I still have some privacy concerns because the chat goes through Meebo’s servers, a company that may or may not protect privacy to the level libraries do. Still, I found the idea intriguing, as apparently did others, since at least four libraries have started doing this recently.

Technically, I think the University of Calgary was the first to do this, probably because Paul Pival works there. And they didn’t integrate MeeboMe halfway or on a test page. No, they integrated it everywhere - on search results, item records, and my favorite, the “no results found” page. That last one is particularly brilliant, as it provides a lifeline at the point of need at a dead end for patrons. So I immediately added this mashup to my core set of slides.

Around the same time, McMaster University did the same thing, proving that great minds do indeed think alike. Then a month later, David King announced that the Topeka Shawnee County Public Library had also integrated a MeeboMe widget into its catalog on the “no results found” page. Thanks, David - I love that I now have a public library example to show. How is a small city library matching services with a big university one? Simply by using copy & paste.

Since pretty much anyone can copy and paste, now Baylor is doing it, too. Can you do it, as well? You bet. Just go to MeeboMe, create a widget, copy the code they give you, and paste it where you want the chat box to appear on the page. So far the results seem to be positive, but I’m hoping these folks will gossip about their mashing in a few months to let us know how it’s going.

In the meantime, I’m waiting for a library to be the first to implement Twitter for catalog or website status updates, to display the latest articles from a database (such as EBSCOHost) on their website using RSS, or to do a Google Maps mashup of local history sites that is displayed on the library’s site. Please let me know if you’ve spotted any of these in the wild.

I haven’t had a chance to try this yet, but my new gaming friend in Hawaii Amy sent me a link to Arcademic Skill Builders, a site full of free educational games for younger kids. They’re done in Flash so that you can play them with your mouse or keyboard, but some of them a’re also designed to be played on the Wii in its web browser, which is just too cool. Literally get kids involved in the game - wonderful.

About Arcademic Skill Builders

“Arcademic Skill Builders are online educational games that offer a powerful approach to learning basic math, language arts, vocabulary, and thinking skills. This program stems from experience, systematic observations, and research in attempting to understand student learning in school and social situations.

The software was inspired by arcade games and the intense engagement they fostered between the game and player. We reasoned if this kind of engagement could be focused on educational content, it would be truly a magical approach to certain kinds of learning.

Philosophically, the games embrace research on learning dealing with ‘automaticity’ and ‘fluency.’ Automaticity is fast and accurate object identification at the single object level. Fluency involves a deeper understanding, and anticipation of what will come next.

Fluency impacts three types of critical learning outcomes:

• Retention: the ability to perform a skill or recall knowledge long after formal learning programs have ended
• Endurance: the ability to maintain performance levels
• Application: the ability to apply what is learned to perform more complex skills in new situations.

These engaging educational games provide focused repetition practice that enables fluency to be achieved more quickly. With what we now know about automaticity and fluency in academic performance, we can help students achieve masterful levels performance faster than ever before! View our manual for more on our philosophy.

Our educational video games offer an innovative approach to teaching basic academic skills by incorporating features of arcade games and educational practices into fun online games that will motivate, intrigue, and teach your students.”

In the future, they’ll be adding “features that will enable you to save records, tailor content, track scores, pinpoint student problem areas, and much more!”

At last month’s Internet Librarian conference, we learned that among other services for seniors, the Old Bridge Public Library in New Jersey was planning to hold a Wii tournament for older adults. Why on earth would a library do this?

Old Bridge Library Unites Generations

“You’re never too old to rock out.

Just ask the 10 Old Bridge seniors who took up Guitar Hero III as part of the Old Bridge Library’s ‘Senior Spaces’ program on Nov. 8.

Seniors, alongside teenage volunteers, tested their mettle in the ubiquitous air-guitar video game and various other games available for the Nintendo Wii gaming system as the first step in the library’s plan to make seniors more technologically proficient and to include them in what Allan Kleiman, assistant director of the Old Bridge Public Library, called the inevitable redesign of libraries.

‘We want to get them to feel they are part of the 21st century library and not left out,’ Kleiman said….

Kleiman said gaming in libraries is becoming more and more common but using the video game to slowly introduce modern technology to seniors is a relatively new idea.

‘This is a lot less frightening to play with than learning to use a computer,’ he said.

Kleiman said seniors should be able to snap a photo with a digital camera or surf the Internet or use the various other technologies surrounding them. The program, he hopes, will provide the catalyst for further learning and inclusion among that community.”…

The program bridges gaps between the ages as well, Kleiman said, allowing teenagers well versed in the ways of the Wii to teach the seniors. The two groups will find a common denominator in competition over the video games. Kleiman said the age segregation that is often found in libraries breaks down when young and old are united by the desire to win.

Kleiman said, though the seniors are undoubtedly learning from the program, they are not the only students in the room. The teenagers learn a bit about life from the seniors.

‘It gives them a whole sense of what growing older can mean,’ Kleiman said, challenging the stereotype of the elderly in nursing homes….

That does not mean the library is going the way of the video arcade. Kleiman said the foundation of the traditional library is still intact but the video games for seniors help “make them feel relevant to what people are doing.”[Home News Tribune]

I really like how the staff at OBPL are approaching this, placing it in a broader context, using video games as teaching moments and touchpoints for social interactions between groups that otherwise don’t socialize together in the library. There are so many video games now that are social activities, not just someone staring at a screen alone (not there’s something wrong with that), and as Eli Neiburger notes, libraries can make games social and add value in the same ways we do for storytime.

I think the social interactions and socialization that takes place around gaming are often overlooked as being something less valuable than when it happens around books. This is one of the reasons that (as with anything) you can’t truly understand the benefits of video games in libraries if you’ve never played them. It’s why I encourage regional organizations (like state libraries and consortia) to purchase a console in order for their member librarians to experience this. It’s difficult to have an informed discussion without the experiential learning aspect. It’s like deciding if a library should offer a book discussion without ever having read a book. Not everyone has to do this, but the folks involved in the discussion should be familiar with the subject, and they can learn from playing the same way seniors at the Old Bridge PL will learn.

Last year I wrote the September/October issue of Library Technology Reports on Gaming in Libraries: Intersection of Services as a general overview that could help jumpstart a discussion in a library (especially with a department head or administrator). During the next few weeks, I’ll be writing an update to that issue, so I’m curious what you’d like to see in this new edition.

My intent is to broaden the discussion about gaming to include a more holistic view of the topic, beyond just video games, as well as diversifying the audience for gaming in libraries beyond just teens. So I have a pretty good idea of what I want to write about, and although I’ll have a shorter length to work with (half as long as the first one because TechSource is trying to reduce the cover price of LTR), I’d still like some input. What questions do you need answered? What do you need help explaining to others in your institution? Which areas need some further exploration?

I’m also hoping to highlight a few more case studies if there’s room. I’m particularly interested in showcasing unique gaming services offered by school and rural public libraries or services to nontraditional patrons, so please let me know if you think you’re doing something good.

Please leave a comment and share your thoughts. Thanks!