One of my favorite things about going to con­fer­ences is get­ting to meet and talk with peo­ple I nor­mally wouldn’t get to know. I had another such expe­ri­ence at Mid­win­ter when I met Leslie Mor­gan, First Year Experience/Education Librar­ian with the Uni­ver­sity of Notre Dame’s Libraries. Last year, she received the Out­stand­ing New Librar­ian Award for the State of Indi­ana because she is an avid sup­porter of infor­ma­tion lit­er­acy and diver­sity pro­grams issues in aca­d­e­mic librar­i­an­ship. She is also very active pro­mot­ing lit­er­acy in the com­mu­nity where she lives.

I met her at Mid­win­ter because Leslie is the chair of the Research to Prac­tice Lit­er­acy Dis­cus­sion Group that hosted a panel pre­sen­ta­tion about gam­ing and lit­er­acy by Scott Nichol­son, Julie Scordato, and myself, along with dis­cus­sion from the stand­ing room only par­tic­i­pants. I was unfa­mil­iar with Notre Dame’s efforts around gam­ing, so my ears perked up when she began talk­ing about what the librar­i­ans there have been doing around gaming.

My favorite ini­tia­tive is a pro­gram they cre­ated for first year stu­dents. Called Caching in at the Libraries, this pro­gram played on the pop­u­lar hobby geo­caching in an attempt to help incom­ing stu­dents learn more about the var­i­ous libraries and ser­vices on campus.

“225 First Year Stu­dents signed up to play the game which con­sisted of find­ing 17 hid­den ‘caches’ through­out Hes­burgh and the branch libraries. 40 stu­dents ended up find­ing at least some of the caches, and 26 stu­dents were able to find all of the hid­den caches. 10 of these stu­dents won iPod Shuf­fles, and the oth­ers won the ND ‘Shirt’.

Though the turnout for the game was not as large as we had hoped, the stu­dents who par­tic­i­pated were very enthu­si­as­tic about it. Many of them have com­mented on how fun it was, and how much they enjoyed vis­it­ing all the libraries. One par­tic­i­pant vol­un­teered this com­ment: ‘I know I’ve been on cam­pus for only 3 weeks but I prob­a­bly would’ve never found out about those libraries. They are very valu­able and inter­est­ing. If I had to give any eval­u­a­tion of the pro­gram, I’d say con­tinue it. Very reward­ing.’ Plans are in the works to sur­vey par­tic­i­pants to find out ways to improve the pro­gram for next year.” [IRIS Depart­ment Newsletter

I think 225 par­tic­i­pants is a darn good turnout for a first attempt, but their efforts didn’t stop there. In addi­tion, the librar­i­ans hosted their first gam­ing night last Decem­ber as an out­reach activ­ity for students.

“This year IRIS, with finan­cial sup­port from User Ser­vices and The First Year of Stud­ies, hosted their first ever Game Night on Decem­ber 12th and 13th — the offi­cial “read­ing days” before finals begin. The events took place in the library lounge and
fea­tured cof­fee, cocoa, hot tea, a host of snacks, and sev­eral lo-tech games. Game Night is our effort to help relieve some of the stress of study­ing for finals, and it is loosely mod­eled on a pro­gram that has been hosted at St. Mary’s for the last few years.

No offi­cial count was taken, but some­where between 300 and 600 stu­dents flocked to the library lounge to graze and game their trou­bles away. Games included Twister, Clue, Monop­oly, Con­nect 4, Oper­a­tion, Play-doh, var­i­ous card games, and sev­eral col­or­ing books and crayons. What games do stu­dents like to play? Oper­a­tion and col­or­ing were by far the most pop­u­lar activ­i­ties. Per­haps we had an abun­dance of pre-med and art stu­dents on hand!

Student’s reac­tions to Game Night were over­whelm­ingly pos­i­tive. Roughly 60 stu­dents com­pleted com­ment cards, and accord­ing to their responses they truly appre­ci­ated the food. Many sug­gested that we try to pro­vide health­ier snack alter­na­tives such as fruit and milk. Many stu­dents liked col­or­ing best, and one stu­dent sug­gested that we pro­vide more hot guys! We’re not sure if that is in our bud­get, but we do hope to host Game Night dur­ing future finals weeks, and we wel­come sug­ges­tions for easy and fun activ­i­ties.” [IRIS Depart­ment Newslet­ter]

Now I’m very inter­ested to track ND’s efforts, as it’s great to have more data from suc­cess­ful gam­ing ini­tia­tives, espe­cially when they’re cre­ative ideas.