Slate has an inter­est­ing slideshow with the slightly mis­lead­ing title Bor­rowed Time: How Do You Build a Pub­lic Library in the Age of Google. I say mis­lead­ing, only because the author lit­er­ally means “build,” as in phys­i­cal build­ing. It doesn’t take into account staff or any web-based ser­vices at all, so why even men­tion Google? Even though it’s an incom­plete pic­ture, I found the last slide espe­cially interesting.

“Ross Daw­son, a busi­ness con­sul­tant who tracks dif­fer­ent cus­toms, devices, and insti­tu­tions on what he calls an Extinc­tion Time­line, pre­dicts that libraries will dis­ap­pear in 2019. He’s prob­a­bly right as far as the func­tion of the library as a civic mon­u­ment, or as a pub­lic repos­i­tory for books, is con­cerned. On the other hand, in its mutat­ing role as urban hang­out, meet­ing place, and arbiter of infor­ma­tion, the pub­lic library seems far from spent. This has less to do with the dig­i­tal world—or the dig­i­tal word—than with the age-old need for human contact.”

I missed Dawson’s orig­i­nal post about the extinc­tion time­line last year, so it was news to me that libraries will dis­ap­pear in just 11 years. I tend to agree more with the Slate author because for me, libraries are about a lot more than just books or study car­rels. That’s why I think there’s room for things like gam­ing in today’s library. (Thanks, Dad!)

I’ve been telling every­one who will lis­ten about Paul Waelchli’s work map­ping the ACRL Infor­ma­tion Lit­er­acy Stan­dards to skills used to play pop­u­lar videogames. I’ve been wait­ing for some­one to do the same thing for school libraries, and now we have our first step towards that goal because Brian Mayer has mapped New York State’s edu­ca­tion stan­dards to some mod­ern board games.

Gam­ing, School Libraries and the Curriculum

“Games engage stu­dents with authen­tic leisure expe­ri­ences while rein­forc­ing a vari­ety of social, lit­er­ary and cur­ric­u­lar skills. When an edu­ca­tional con­cept is intro­duced and rein­forced dur­ing a game, it is inter­nal­ized as part of an enjoy­able expe­ri­ence and fur­ther uti­lized as one aspect of a strat­egy to attain success.

Games also carry other ben­e­fits. They help stu­dents con­nect and build social skills, work­ing as part of a team or nego­ti­at­ing the most advan­ta­geous sit­u­a­tion for them­selves. It also pro­vides an oppor­tu­nity for stu­dents to to explore a host of life skills not inher­ent in the cur­ricu­lum , but impor­tant for suc­cess. Some of these include: micro-managing resources and options; actively re-evaluating, re-prioritizing and re-adjusting goals based on uncer­tain and shift­ing sit­u­a­tions; deter­min­ing accept­able losses in an effort to obtain an end goal; and employ­ing ana­lyt­i­cal and crit­i­cal skills to more authen­tic social experiences.

Here is a list of NYS stan­dards cur­rently sup­ported by a well estab­lished school game library:

NYS Social Stud­ies Standards:

• Stan­dard 3: Geog­ra­phy Stu­dents will use a vari­ety of intel­lec­tual skills to demon­strate their under­stand­ing of the geog­ra­phy of the inter­de­pen­dent world in which we live—local, national, and global—including the dis­tri­b­u­tion of peo­ple, places, and envi­ron­ments over the Earth’s surface.
  • Ten Days In.. Series
  • Ticket to Ride Series
     
• Stan­dard 4: Eco­nom­ics Stu­dents will use a vari­ety of intel­lec­tual skills to demon­strate their under­stand­ing of how the United States and other soci­eties develop eco­nomic sys­tems and asso­ci­ated insti­tu­tions to allo­cate scarce resources, how major decision-making units func­tion in the U.S. and other national economies, and how an econ­omy solves the scarcity prob­lem through mar­ket and non-market mechanisms.
  • Catan Series
  • Puerto Rico” [<a href=http://librarygamer.wordpress.com/”>Library Gamer]

Sev­eral more are listed in the post, so please click through to see just how good a fit this can be.

If you still ques­tion whether there are lit­era­cies (espe­cially information-related ones) involved in play­ing videogames, ask your­self if those same things hap­pen around play­ing board games. If your answer is that yes, they do, what then is the dif­fer­ence between learn­ing those skills through board games and learn­ing them through videogames? Brian’s work helps illus­trate the sim­i­lar­i­ties but even more impor­tantly, it shows how eas­ily a school library could start out with the famil­iar world of board games as a way to imple­ment gam­ing ser­vices and engage stu­dents more inter­ac­tively in learn­ing infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy skills. Thanks, Brian!

Super­pa­tron Ed Viel­metti is spec­u­lat­ing that Ann Arbor Dis­trict Library might be get­ting ready to con­nect Twit­ter and the Library. Not that I’m putting any pres­sure on AADL, but if any­one was going to do it, I’d expect it to be them.

“Once upon a time I built a ‘super­pa­tron­bot’ that searched the AADL cat­a­log via a Jab­ber bot — quite rea­son­ably you could build one of these upon Twitter’s direct mes­sage list­ings. Use­ful? Per­haps, espe­cially if I could link a Twit­ter account to my library card and then be able to twitter

d aadl reserve anatomy of a mur­der dvd

and have it do a hold on it for me (or return some dis­am­bigua­tor if there were mul­ti­ple choices).”

You can find the new, announce­ments Twit­ter feed for AADL at http://twitter.com/aadl.

If you want to ask AADL staff what they’re up to these days, head to the Library Camp tak­ing place there on March 20. It’s free to attend, and the dis­cus­sions are sure to fire up your brain.

I won’t be able to attend because I will be kick­ing off the day at the SOLINET/OCLC CAPCON event Chang­ing the Way Libraries Do Busi­ness: Meet­ing the Chal­lenges of the Web 2.0 World in Arling­ton, Vir­ginia. I’ll be giv­ing an overview of 2.0, but I’m really look­ing for­ward to hear­ing the other speak­ers for the day — Kate Shee­han, Jamie Coniglio, Jen­nifer How­ell, and Karen Cal­houn. You can still reg­is­ter, and you attend, please be sure to say hi.

If you can’t make either of these great events, you can try for Library Camp Kansas the day before, on March 19, another uncon­fer­ence that promises some great discussions.

Shout out to Gay­lordg for help­ing get this project off the ground.

Pro­fes­sor receives grant to bring gam­ing to libraries, other campuses

“[Scott] Nichol­son, an asso­ciate pro­fes­sor in the School of Infor­ma­tion Stud­ies, recently received a $5,000 grant from Gay­lord Broth­ers, a library sup­ply com­pany located in Syra­cuse, to begin build­ing a portable library game lab. Money from the grant will specif­i­cally go toward pur­chas­ing pro­jec­tors, con­soles, screens, acces­sories and games, Nichol­son said.

‘This was a great way for Gay­lord to sup­port Syra­cuse Uni­ver­sity, the com­mu­nity and gam­ing libraries in gen­eral,; said Henry Orr, direc­tor of busi­ness devel­op­ment at Gay­lord. He also noted that the credit for the grant should go to Gaylord’s Pres­i­dent and CEO Guy Marhewka.…

Nicholson’s goal is to explore the impli­ca­tions of offer­ing gam­ing as a library ser­vice. Addi­tion­ally, he hopes to study the entire gam­ing expe­ri­ence and how gam­ing will change the atti­tudes of stu­dents toward the library.

‘Gam­ing activ­i­ties are like the new cof­fee shop in Bird Library; it’s not about the cof­fee so much as the social atmos­phere it cre­ates,’ Nichol­son said.…

‘Gam­ing is cur­rently the wild, wild west of libraries,’ Orr said.…

The Library Game Lab project will occur in three main phases, depend­ing on the avail­abil­ity of out­side fund­ing. Nichol­son has been work­ing on the first phase of the project for the past year, work­ing with stu­dents to sur­vey libraries and how they view gaming.…

The project’s cur­rent phase, to cre­ate a portable library game lab, will be fol­lowed by the next phase, to increase aware­ness about the project.

‘With this project, I will travel to library con­fer­ences and expose librar­i­ans to the spec­trum of games, talk about what types of games are best for cer­tain demo­graphic groups with libraries and col­lect more data about what is hap­pen­ing,’ Nichol­son said.

The third and final phase of the project will be to set up research projects, which will explore how the dif­fer­ent types of games relate to dif­fer­ent types of people.

‘This will be the ongo­ing life of the lab — to ana­lyze new games and game types, to rec­om­mend the best games for dif­fer­ent goals and demo­graphic groups and to work with indus­try to help them cre­ate gam­ing expe­ri­ences more suited for a library/school set­ting,’ Nichol­son said.

Nichol­son said as soon as he is able to secure more fund­ing to build the pro­gram, he hopes to start aggres­sively draw­ing in stu­dents to help with the project. So far he has relied heav­ily on vol­un­teers to help with research and pro­mot­ing the pro­gram. In addi­tion, Nichol­son is teach­ing a graduate-level iSchool class in May on gam­ing in libraries, and it has already received con­sid­er­able stu­dent interest.

There has been both sup­port and crit­i­cism from the Syra­cuse com­mu­nity at large regard­ing the Library Game Lab, but Nichol­son said the key is get­ting peo­ple to under­stand that this is not about ‘first per­son shoot­ers,’ but rather about ‘under­stand­ing how gam­ing works as a ser­vice and how libraries and schools can be engaged.’ ” [The Daily Orange]

If you’re a reg­u­lar online, you prob­a­bly know or know of Blake Carver. Even if you’ve never met him, you know his work. He’s been run­ning and main­tain­ing the incred­i­ble LIS­News hub since 1999. This con­tri­bu­tion alone is why many of us admire him for his ded­i­ca­tion and vision.

In 2002, Blake started LISHost, an afford­able web­site host­ing ser­vice for libraries and libraries. On the very rare occa­sion the LISHost server goes down, you can tell something’s amiss because half the known LIS world must house their sites there. I do, as does Michael Stephens, and we can both tell you from first-hand expe­ri­ence that Blake does a super­hu­man job of main­tain­ing the server (espe­cially secu­rity) and pro­vid­ing tech­ni­cal support.

I can’t think of a time when Blake hasn’t responded imme­di­ately when there was a prob­lem, when he said no to a request to add soft­ware just for me, or when he didn’t come up with a cre­ative solu­tion to a prob­lem no one else would have wanted to deal with. And for all of his hard work (truly, the man must not sleep), he charges next to noth­ing for the ser­vices you get.

So to thank him for all of his efforts, both on our behalf and for the pro­fes­sion, Michael and I are raf­fling off a Nin­tendo Wii to help show our appre­ci­a­tion in the form of a fundraiser. Please note that nei­ther LISHost nor LIS­News is in finan­cial trou­ble, and this is not a call to “save” them. This is sim­ply a way for us to acknowl­edge Blake’s efforts and thank him for every­thing he does.

So here’s how it works. Every­one who donates $10 or more to LISHost by 11:59 p.m. on March 14, 2008, will be eli­gi­ble to win the Wii. We’ll pull a name out of the dig­i­tal hat, so-to-speak, and send you the Wii if you’re the lucky win­ner. To enter/donate, click on the but­ton below. Your dona­tion is your entry, as we’ll have a full list of names from Paypal.

Update: The dona­tion period has closed. Thanks to those of you who contributed!

Undead Dead End

Orig­i­nally uploaded by her­zogbr

In response to my post about IM wid­gets at dead ends, Brian Her­zog offers a great exam­ple of using a grease­mon­key script to pro­vide an email door out of the “no search results” page of his cat­a­log. Since his library doesn’t offer IM ref­er­ence, this is the next best thing to insert­ing a librar­ian back into the search process.

Because grease­mon­key only works with Fire­fox, users of other browsers won’t see the form, but that’s why there’s an email address at the top. Could this be used with data­bases, as well? Prob­a­bly only if the ven­dor lets you cus­tomize the code on that page.

Hardy pro­gram­mer types with full access to the back­end of their cat­a­log could add an HTML form to level the play­ing field in that respect.

Or, ven­dors could pro­vide this type of func­tion­al­ity as part of the default sys­tem and the library could just spec­ify where the email should go on a set­tings screen. There could also be a box to embed code for instant mes­sag­ing wid­gets for libraries that offer IM help.

Brian is mak­ing the script freely avail­able here.

Check out Paul Waelchli’s arti­cle in the Jan­u­ary 2008 issue of C&RL News in which he expands on his blog posts about infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy and fan­tasy foot­ball.

Librar­i­ans’ Sport of Choice: Teach­ing Infor­ma­tion Lit­er­acy through Fan­tasy Football

“Librar­i­ans want stu­dents to effec­tively iden­tify and eval­u­ate infor­ma­tion and make deci­sions based upon what they dis­cover. These are just some of the skills that an infor­ma­tion lit­er­ate stu­dent suc­cess­fully applies. These are the same skills that more than 19 mil­lion peo­ple use on a daily or weekly basis play­ing fan­tasy sports.1 As the NFL foot­ball sea­son comes to a close, mil­lions of Amer­i­cans, some as young as 12 years old, have spent the past few months con­nected to infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy. They just don’t know it.

The chal­lenge for librar­i­ans is to con­nect fan­tasy sports skills to infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy and cre­ate build­ing blocks for aca­d­e­mic appli­ca­tions of the same con­cepts. One library, Uni­ver­sity of Dubuque, did just this by teach­ing fan­tasy foot­ball research to incom­ing stu­dent ath­letes. Through the les­son, stu­dents engaged in dis­cus­sions of cred­itabil­ity, valid­ity, time­li­ness, and search strate­gies to find and eval­u­ate fan­tasy foot­ball information.…

The high level of player invest­ment cre­ates edu­ca­tional oppor­tu­ni­ties for librar­i­ans. Accord­ing to a 2006 study by the Fan­tasy Sports Asso­ci­a­tion, a large num­ber of col­lege stu­dents play fan­tasy sports. Librar­i­ans can build upon the infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy skills that stu­dents are already uncon­sciously using through fan­tasy sports play. The suc­cess­ful fan­tasy sport player con­sis­tently applies four of the five ACRL Infor­ma­tion Lit­er­acy Com­pe­tency Stan­dards (2000).…

At the end of the ses­sions, the stu­dents com­pleted a short eval­u­a­tion that assessed both cri­te­ria for eval­u­at­ing sources and library per­cep­tions. More than 80 per­cent of stu­dents were able to describe two of three appro­pri­ate source eval­u­a­tion cri­te­ria and more than 60 per­cent pro­vided all three. The stu­dents were asked to describe what research meant to them before the ses­sion and responses included, ‘headaches,’ ‘work I didn’t want to do,’ and ‘school work.’ The responses to the same ques­tion after the ses­sions showed a dra­matic change in per­spec­tive and included, ‘mak­ing sure one is get­ting accu­rate infor­ma­tion,’ ‘com­par­ing and know­ing where I’m get­ting my infor­ma­tion,” and “fun work.” While the ‘fun work’ might be a stretch when home­work is involved, it does show a change in per­spec­tive and aware­ness about research. One stu­dent first said that before the ses­sion, research meant ‘school,’ but after­wards he responded, ‘everything.’

In addi­tion to the change in per­cep­tion of research, the stu­dent ath­letes were asked about their per­cep­tion of librar­i­ans. Prior to the fan­tasy foot­ball ori­en­ta­tion ses­sion, the stu­dents had a 66 per­cent ‘very pos­i­tive’ impres­sion of librar­i­ans. After the ses­sion, the stu­dents “very pos­i­tive” per­cep­tion was more than 90 per­cent. While these results are not sci­en­tific and large enough to gen­er­al­ize, they show a dis­tinct change in stu­dents’ impres­sions of libraries and their own abil­i­ties. One stu­dent stated, ‘I made the fan­tasy foot­ball con­nec­tion to look­ing up school stuff quick, it worked well.’ ”

And if you haven’t seen it, Paul’s chart illus­trat­ing which of the ACRL Infor­ma­tion Lit­er­acy Stan­dard are involved in play­ing Final Fan­tasy, Halo, and Mad­den (foot­ball) is also well worth your time.