Building Better Libraries Through Video Games

This is a bit of moldy news, but, over the weekend, a group of American librarians who work at colleges and universities were told that if they wanted their book stacks and help services to remain relevant for today’s youth, they should somehow gain the skills one would learn from playing video games.

At a packed session for academic librarians attending the annual meeting of the American Library Association, in Washington, the topic was how to help students who have learned many of their information gathering and analysis skills from video games apply that knowledge in the library. Speakers said that gaming skills are in many ways representative of a broader cultural divide between today’s college students and the librarians who hope to teach them. …
George M. Needham, vice president for member services of the Online Computer Library Center, stressed that he wasn’t suggesting that college libraries “tear up the stacks to put in arcades,” but that they rethink many assumptions.

“The librarian as information priest is as dead as Elvis,” Needham said. The whole “gestalt” of the academic library has been set up like a church, he said, with various parts of a reading room acting like “the stations of the cross,” all leading up to the “altar of the reference desk,” where “you make supplication and if you are found worthy, you will be helped.”

Some of the ideas are flaky – I could never see a library hosting a loud LAN party, for one – but it’s an interesting and quick read to see how digital design practices might be applied in the real world, and how traditional services might be on the verge of shifting in the digital age.

Memo to the librarians needing a cheat code in filing the stacks: it's left, right, left, right, up, down, up, down, A, B, A, B, start. Or something like that.

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Building Better Libraries Through Video Games

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