A Report from the Field from Rick Glady
“We recently completed a 6-month trial of Family Gaming at the Civic Center Library, City of Scottsdale, Arizona. It began as an Adult Gaming program, but we didn’t seem to be able to draw in enough adults to make it worthwhile to be strictly an adult program.
We did find out, however, from the first program that we drew patrons of all ages and had an attendance figure (based on an electronic door counter) of 200–300. The nice thing was the diversity, not just in terms of race, but ages as well of the attendees. If ever asked about the Wii, you can pass on that I had one woman who was in a wheelchair after 7 back surgeries playing Wii with her grandson, and I had one man who, although legally blind, was able to pitch an inning of baseball. In the end, we had over 1,100 attendees for the program.
Just some basic facts: Scottsdale Public Library has a pretty successful teem gaming program (begun by me 3 years ago), and is holding gaming for kids 6–11 this summer at 2 libraries. I had 5 gaming systems: PS3 playing Rock Band, XBox 360 playing Viva Piñata, Wii playing Wii Sports, and 2 PS2’s playing Guitar Hero and DDR (the first month), and NickToons-the last five months.”
Thank you to Rick for letting me know about this. I can’t wait to hear how the summer program goes.
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Pingback by lkji.info » Blog Archive » A Report from the Field from Rick Glady — July 18, 2008 @ 8:35 am
I love that my local public library offers gaming, but my biggest gripe is that it’s only offered for teens (grades 7–12). I have been fairly vocal asking why they didn’t offer gaming for us grownups, but they haven’t done anything yet. We 30-somethings like games, too!! To their credit, the library does circulate games, but it seems like the good ones are always checked out…
Comment by Julie — July 18, 2008 @ 9:17 am
Interesting that public libraries have started to hock into one of the more dynamic social experience, yet our academic librarians have done very little to save the documentation, software, and hardware. As more educators and researchers have begun to try to understand all the elements of the human experience that are affected by gaming, we are going to need to grapple with preserving and distributing these works.
Comment by Eric Robinson — July 18, 2008 @ 10:30 am
[…] Tech Talker Rick Glady sent a blurb about Scottsdale Public Library’s gaming program to The Shifted Librarian, which was posted on Friday! Rick’s done a terrific job bringing in his own systems to get […]
Pingback by Shifted Scottsdale « MCLC Library Tech Talk — July 21, 2008 @ 4:41 pm
Rick is an awesome supporter of gaming in the public library and has done an incredible job of promoting it at Scottsdale. Rick is also an active member of MCLC Tech Talk (mclctechtalk.wordpress.com)
Thanks to SPL’s committment to this kind of programming and to Rick’s natural enthusiasm for all things game, it’s been a great success. Way to go Rick!
Comment by Mary Mitchell — July 23, 2008 @ 3:04 pm
[…] game machines or staff who game, I had to do things a bit differently to the really awesome programs I’ve seen around the […]
Pingback by gaming in the library « geek.anachronism — September 6, 2008 @ 7:49 pm