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.

If you can help with the fol­low­ing request, please con­tact Sarah directly. Thanks!

“I am curi­ous if any­one knows of research (infor­mal and for­mal) going on with under­grad­u­ates and media lit­er­acy. I’d like to hear about projects that look at usabil­ity and inter­face design and also any projects that mea­sure visual or media lit­er­acy com­pe­ten­cies. If you know of any rel­e­vant projects, con­tact Sarah Bor­dac, Instruc­tion & Out­reach Librar­ian @ Brown Uni­ver­sity and LIS doc­toral stu­dent at Sim­mons College.”

Last year, I noted a librar­ian who waives the fines of patrons who play DDR against her. This year, the Wadleigh Memo­r­ial Library makes it an offi­cial part of its Patron Appre­ci­a­tion Day.

Library Patrons Try to Dance Away Late Fees at Video Game Competition

“Library users with unpaid fines had a chance to redeem them­selves Thurs­day dur­ing the annual Patron Appre­ci­a­tion Day at the Wadleigh Memo­r­ial Library.

Instead of a scold­ing when they arrived, delin­quent patrons were received like party guests.

Patrons were invited to make good on unpaid fines by donat­ing canned and pack­aged foods for the local soup kitchen or by enter­ing a dance com­pe­ti­tion, ‘Dance Dance Revolution.’

To sweeten the pot, dur­ing most of the day the library served cof­fee, bagels, pas­tries and ice cream, donated by area businesses.…

The teen and pre­teen girls who showed up to play Dance Dance included 18-year-old Missy Hutchins, who owed $5 in fines, and Eli­cia Val­lier, 12, and Maria Roma­nenko, 11, who had no debts to pay.

Hutchins, who has been play­ing the video dance game for four years, includ­ing sev­eral as part of DDR club at Mil­ford High School, won her round against Spof­ford and hap­pily reported to the front desk with a coupon she used to pay off her $5 obligation.

The other girls took sec­ond turns com­pet­ing against the librar­ian, just for fun.

‘Video games are things kids like to do, and we thought this would bring them in to the library,’ Spof­ford said before the dance con­test began. ‘If they have fines, they don’t come in. We don’t want them to be afraid to come in.’ ” [Nashua Tele­graph, via joys­tiq, thanks James!]

• Pri­mary Game: Can­di­dates as Con­soles
  “As pun­dits pon­der the resur­gence of Hillary Clin­ton in New Hamp­shire, here’s a handy high-tech guide to the three Demo­c­ra­tic fron­trun­ners. Because as it hap­pens, they’re best under­stood in rela­tion to the top three video game con­soles.” Click through to find out why Barack Obama is the Nin­tendo Wii, Hillary Clin­ton is the Microsoft Xbox 360, and John Edwards is the Playsta­tion 3. [GigaOM, via Game Pol­i­tics]
• The 2008 Pres­i­den­tial Pri­mary Can­di­dates as D&D Char­ac­ters
  “To help me decide I’ve trans­lated each can­di­date into a D&D char­ac­ter. If you had to pick one based on the D&D attrib­utes assigned, who would you select?” [Rhap­sody Radish]

We know that enter­pris­ing libraries such as The Uni­ver­sity of Cal­gary, McMas­ter Uni­ver­sity, Topeka Shawnee County Pub­lic Library, and Bay­lor Uni­ver­sity have imple­mented Mee­boMe wid­gets at the dead ends of their cat­a­logs. I’m won­der­ing if any libraries have gone fur­ther to add this type of func­tion­al­ity to the “sorry, no search results” pages in the data­bases they pay for or on the 404 error pages on their web­sites, blogs, etc.?

The lat­ter could be under our con­trol (for many libraries, not all), but is there even a ven­dor out there that lets libraries cus­tomize the dead end mes­sages? If you know of one, please let me know in the comments!