There were many rea­sons I hosted the ALA Tech­Source Gam­ing, Learn­ing, and Libraries Sym­po­sium this past July, not the least of which was to share with oth­ers the breadth of gam­ing ser­vices libraries can offer. The fact that I got to meet some of my heroes (like Henry Jenk­ins and James Paul Gee), as well as meet new peo­ple doing inter­est­ing things around gam­ing, was rich and tasty gravy.

Two of those peo­ple were Mark Engel­brecht and Mar­tin House from the Pub­lic Library of Char­lotte Meck­len­burg County, who received a $69,000 LSTA grant to study gam­ing for adults last year. There’s a rea­son we talk so much about the kids and the teenagers when it comes to gam­ing in libraries, but we can’t for­get that there are valid gam­ing ser­vices for 20somethings, 30somethings, fam­i­lies, par­ents, boomers, seniors, and pretty much every­one else who enjoys games. So their ses­sion at the Sym­po­sium was high on my list to hear but as it turns out, when you host an event like this, it’s highly unlikely that you’ll actu­ally get to see much of the pre­sen­ta­tions. So I missed almost all of their talk, and unfor­tu­nately we didn’t have video of it. There is audio, which you can grab to lis­ten to here, and I highly rec­om­mend you do that.

But now, you can also read (and sub­scribe) to Mar­tin House’s new blog Tech­naeum, where he will be post­ing excerpts of their research and data from the grant. I’m thrilled about this, because it solid­i­fies 2007 as the first year we started get­ting actual num­bers of any kind sur­round­ing gam­ing in libraries, and just like Scott Nicholson’s data, PLCMC’s num­bers are fascinating.

Gam­ing and Libraries: Ref­er­ence Ain’t Dead

“As an indi­ca­tion that ref­er­ence really ‘ain’t’ dead, I would like to share some research with you from an LSTA Inno­va­tions Grant. The library received $69,000 to cre­ate gam­ing pro­grams for adults and study the impact of these events in terms of their library use. What we found is that the sin­gle biggest rea­son patrons cited for com­ing to the library was ref­er­ence, or an infor­ma­tional need.…

…libraries today are still faced with the age old charge, being ‘The People’s Uni­ver­sity.’ If my research is any indi­ca­tion of this, libraries are more needed than ever due to people’s needs to have knowl­edge­able pro­fes­sion­als guide them through the world of infor­ma­tion over­load — oh and bad infor­ma­tion too boot.

There is also a very good indi­ca­tion that patron who attended the gam­ing pro­grams fre­quented the library more in sub­se­quent months.”

Be sure to read the rest of Martin’s post and to check back or sub­scribe to his blog, because he will be post­ing about their research reg­u­larly. Thanks, Mar­tin — this is a huge con­tri­bu­tion to the profession.