This is par­tially archival for me so that I can eas­ily get back to this quote for future pre­sen­ta­tions and par­tially pro­mo­tional because I think it high­lights just a cou­ple of the ben­e­fits of imple­ment­ing gam­ing in the library. The quote below is from Mon­ica Har­ris, Young Adult Librar­ian at the Oak Park Pub­lic Library in Illinois.

OPPL is just get­ting started offer­ing gam­ing, and they’re div­ing in with a tour­na­ment. They didn’t com­mit­tee the idea to death, and I like that they rec­og­nize they’ll be learn­ing a lot along the way. Already, though, they’re see­ing ben­e­fits both inter­nally and exter­nally. Empha­sis is mine.

“The play­ers we have attracted are, by and large, a com­pletely new group of kids for us. Their par­ents come in baf­fled that their chil­dren are SO EXCITED for a library pro­gram, and this has facil­i­tated a his­toric col­lab­o­ra­tion between myself and the IT depart­ment. Before this pro­gram, our IT depart­ment had never been a part of any library pro­gram, and now there are at least two of them attend­ing every time we do a tour­na­ment — and they like it! This has been a won­der­ful learn­ing process for all of us — and we still have a long way to go before it will reach the high pro­gram­ming stan­dard we hope it will even­tu­ally achieve.”