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.