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]