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.

I’ve been wait­ing for Michael Wesch, the Kansas State pro­fes­sor who cre­ated the viral The Machine Is Us/ing Us and A Vision of Stu­dents Today videos, to do one that more directly addresses libraries. Last week he did just that. Hope­fully it will help spread David Weinberger’s mes­sage from Every­thing Is Mis­cel­la­neous (which you need to read if you haven’t already). Is your library part of this new r/evolution, or are you still fac­ing the future with only a 20th cen­tury ser­vice orientation?

Infor­ma­tion R/evolution.

Bonus link via Paul Pival: Jon Udell on Remix­ing the Library
. Can your patrons remix your library?

“Any dis­cus­sion of the future of libraries must con­sider the impact of the tech­no­log­i­cal advances and inno­va­tions that are inex­tri­ca­bly wound up with library oper­a­tions and user expec­ta­tions. Accord­ing to Rachel Singer Gor­don, librar­i­ans remain rel­e­vant and use­ful by con­fronting tech­no­log­i­cal chal­lenges head-on and find­ing ways to inte­grate the best and most appro­pri­ate inno­va­tions into library ser­vices and operations.

In Infor­ma­tion Tomor­row, Gor­don brings together 20 of today’s lead­ing thinkers on the inter­sec­tions between libraries and tech­nol­ogy. They address var­i­ous ways in which new tech­nolo­gies influ­ence librar­i­ans’ actions and goals and offer ideas for using tech­nol­ogy to meet patrons where they are. The result is an engag­ing, wide-ranging, and some­times provoca­tive dis­cus­sion for sys­tems librar­i­ans, library IT work­ers, library man­agers and admin­is­tra­tors, and any­one work­ing with or inter­ested in tech­nol­ogy in libraries.”

I’m hon­ored to have authored one of the chap­ters in this book, both because of Rachel’s vision and because of the qual­ity of my fel­low authors. Learn more (and order a copy) here.

I just returned from giv­ing a pre­sen­ta­tion about gam­ing and libraries to a crowd of enthu­si­as­tic librar­i­ans at the Net­Speed Con­fer­ence in Cal­gary. I love doing pre­sen­ta­tions for and talk­ing with Cana­dian librar­i­ans, because I think they do a much bet­ter job of pool­ing resources and work­ing together than we do in the U.S. I’ll be inter­ested to see if they apply that same effort to gam­ing (I’m bet­ting they will).

For those Net­Speed­ers who may be vis­it­ing here for the first time, wel­come! Please feel free to leave a com­ment about the pre­sen­ta­tion or gam­ing in gen­eral. The slides will be avail­able at http://theshiftedlibrarian.pbwiki.com/ later today.

I also want to thank the con­fer­ence orga­niz­ers for mak­ing a dona­tion to the Lois Hole Library Legacy Pro­gram in my name. What a great idea. Yeah, Cana­dian librar­i­ans rock hard.

Patrick McDon­ald let me know he has started a new blog, PHM3. The sub­ti­tle is “Infor­ma­tion, Libraries, and Provoca­tive Ideas,” and the first one is a doozy: The Google Propo­si­tion — Chal­leng­ing our Iden­tity, Fur­ther­ing Our Mission?

“Imag­ine this: Google, whose mis­sion is ‘to orga­nize the world’s infor­ma­tion and make it uni­ver­sally acces­si­ble and use­ful’, real­izes it’s too expen­sive or just not worth it to fight the fight to scan and make copy­righted books avail­able online. Instead they acquire one or more pub­lish­ing houses (who per­haps can be had for a rea­son­able price because their major media par­ents are dis­ap­pointed with their con­tri­bu­tions to the cor­po­rate bot­tom line) with the inten­tion of pro­vid­ing unlim­ited simul­ta­ne­ous, free access to texts online while ‘mon­e­tiz­ing’ that access via adver­tis­ing in the same way they have very suc­cess­fully mon­e­tized search results. Then being as resource rich as they are, Google attracts writ­ers and book pro­duc­ers by offer­ing bet­ter com­pen­sa­tion in exchange for the right make their to-be-published works imme­di­ately and ‘uni­ver­sally acces­si­ble’ online. In addi­tion to mon­e­tiz­ing book access, Google claims it is doing ‘good’ by mak­ing this infor­ma­tion ‘uni­ver­sally acces­si­ble and use­ful’ free of charge to readers.…

Would we protest, per­haps out of a short-sighted desire to pre­serve our­selves as an insti­tu­tion as we have tra­di­tion­ally existed?

OR

Would we embark on some kind of ‘trans­for­ma­tional change’ (as many before me have called it), sat­is­fied our mis­sion of pro­vid­ing freely avail­able infor­ma­tion is sub­stan­tially (if not per­fectly acheived — per­haps nego­ti­at­ing elec­tronic and hard copy fail safes to main­tain access in case Google and oth­ers become ‘evil’) and reori­ent and rede­vote our­selves using freed up resources to address other com­mu­nity needs — host­ing cul­tural and/or social cen­ters, focus­ing on instruct­ing and becom­ing ‘People’s Uni­ver­si­ties’, nav­i­gat­ing the avail­able infor­ma­tion etc.…”

Could Google rede­fine copy­right (dig­i­tal fair use rights really) through behav­ior rather than law? As Anil Dash notes, “If YouTube has cre­ated some­thing fan­tas­tic, and it required copy­right vio­la­tion to do so, then copy­right law should be changed to make it legal. Laws are ours, peo­ple — they’re not carved on stone tablets.” What would dig­i­tal fair use rights look like in this model? You can remix and re-use con­tent, as long as you keep the ads? Do the ads become part of the copy­righted work?

Provoca­tive indeed — leave your thoughts over on Paul’s blog, and then sub­scribe to his feed to find out how he tops this post.

This time it’s in the Dal­las Morn­ing News and the arti­cle is called Video Games Encour­age Teens to Check Out Libraries.

The good news: We learn that the Forth Worth Pub­lic Library is cre­at­ing a room ded­i­cated to gam­ing. Can’t wait to learn more about that!

The bad news: Yet another news­pa­per story that lets some­one (this time a pro­fes­sor at the Uni­ver­sity of Mary­land) get away with sweep­ing gen­er­al­iza­tions about gam­ing. Melanie Killen claims, “a vast major­ity of the games have neg­a­tive con­tent and the con­se­quences can be destruc­tive, includ­ing increased impul­siv­ity, aggres­sive behav­ior and shorter atten­tion spans,” with­out pro­vid­ing any proof at all.

Whether that’s her fault or the newspaper’s, let’s just nip this in the bud right now in case you encounter this argu­ment at your own library.

First of all, 85% of the games sold in 2006 were rated E (for Every­one), E+10 (ages 10 and up), or T (for Teen). That means only 15% of video games sold in 2006 where rated for adults, so that’s hardly a “vast major­ity.” Only 4 of the top 20 games sold in 2006 were rated M (Mature) (PDF). That would be 1/5, which means the “vast major­ity” of games sold were actu­ally appro­pri­ate for kids and teenagers.

Sec­ond of all, let’s define what we mean by “destruc­tive” and “aggres­sive behav­ior,” because as video games have become more pop­u­lar, youth vio­lence has actu­ally dropped, despite those sto­ries that grab all the head­lines.

Third, “impul­siv­ity” and “shorter atten­tion spans” can be attrib­uted to many things, not just video games. If I’m not mis­taken, these argu­ments were made against tele­vi­sion forty years ago, so it’s not like this is some­thing new and it’s not like you can blame video games as the mas­ter evil behind these prob­lems. In fact, one won­ders if shorter, less com­plex news­pa­per sto­ries that fail to pro­vide facts or links for fur­ther infor­ma­tion or, you know, evidence/data/research might con­tribute to that trend, too.

What’s really ironic is that Killen is later quoted as say­ing, ” ‘There is a con­cern in our soci­ety about the prepa­ra­tion of the next work­force in terms of read­ing and math and sci­ence skills,’ she said. ‘We should be doing every­thing we can to facil­i­tate that, and I think that allow­ing video games to go in libraries is a bad sig­nal.’ ” If you run into this mis­guided assump­tion your­self, you can point folks to this report or this report or this report (PDF), which dis­cuss how gam­ing can help with exactly those things.

The worst part? They cite a fig­ure for the num­ber of libraries offer­ing con­sole or PC gam­ing pro­grams that is flat out wrong, all the more curi­ous since the sum­mary of the sur­vey is avail­able online (PDF). Had they both­ered to point to it from the arti­cle, they might have got­ten it right. Sadly, the DMN doesn’t allow com­ments or track­backs, so their read­ers will never know just how wrong the paper got this story. Luck­ily, the rest of us do.

Come have fun work­ing with us as ACRL’s Man­ager of Web Ser­vices:

“Respon­si­bil­i­ties: Report­ing to the Assis­tant Direc­tor of ACRL and Direc­tor of Pro­fes­sional Devel­op­ment, you will be respon­si­ble for the devel­op­ment and man­age­ment of ACRL’s e-learning pro­gram (includ­ing tech­nol­ogy and instruc­tional design for web­casts, e-seminars, vir­tual insti­tutes, vir­tual national con­fer­ences); develop new Web-based prod­ucts and ser­vices; develop, man­age, and assess ACRL web pres­ence ensur­ing it meets mem­ber and pub­lic expec­ta­tions; serve as staff liai­son to com­mit­tee web edi­tors and other mem­ber committees.

Require­ments: MLS; sev­eral years expe­ri­ence in an academic/research library; writing/editing expe­ri­ence; knowl­edge of instruc­tional design for online envi­ron­ments; under­stand­ing of Web design, Web usabil­ity meth­ods, Web archi­tec­ture con­cepts, Web course­ware (e.g., WebCT/Moodle), Dreamweaver or other Web author­ing soft­ware, Web 2.0 tools, HTML, and MS Office,; expe­ri­ence work­ing with con­tent man­age­ment sys­tems (CMS). In addi­tion, must demon­strate ini­tia­tive, entre­pre­neur­ial drive, com­mit­ment to con­tin­u­ous learn­ing, strong cus­tomer ser­vice ori­en­ta­tion, excep­tional com­mu­ni­ca­tion, orga­ni­za­tional and inter­per­sonal skills; abil­ity to han­dle mul­ti­ple projects suc­cess­fully and func­tion in a team-based envi­ron­ment. Pre­ferred: expe­ri­ence work­ing with Cold­Fu­sion and Flash; knowl­edge of Web search soft­ware and tag­ging for opti­mal rank­ing of ACRL prod­ucts and services.

Full-time, 35 hours/wk; start­ing salary from low 50s –nego­tiable based on expe­ri­ence. Inter­ested can­di­dates should for­ward their resume and cover let­ter to: Amer­i­can Library Asso­ci­a­tion, Human Resources Dept. Ref. WebMgr/ACRL, 50 E. Huron St, Chicago, IL 60611, fax: 312/280‑5270, email: mpullen@ala.org

Close date: Novem­ber 1 or until posi­tion is filled.”