Library Blogs

Things are still going slow with the game collection, but they should start to pick up in July as I'll finally be able to start purchasing games and systems and hardware and stuff. No worries, everything is still on track for an opening in mid to late August. In the meanwhile we've received a couple of classic game systems as donations. These are the games from my own childhood!

We're in a bit of a lull on activity for the game collection: Waiting for the fiscal year to kick over so that we have a budget to buy things; waiting for various dominoes to fall in the room renovation; waiting to interview applicants for the manager position; etc. Monday morning I'm meeting with one of the managers from the electronic cataloging unit to discuss how exactly we're going to catalog these things. Should be interesting! She asked me to give her a list of the donated games we've received, so I figured I'd share.

Last month I attended the annual Digital Library Federation spring meeting and David Rumsey, renowned for his collection of historical maps, was one of the keynote speakers. Prompted by David Rumsey’s map ticker and what he said in passing about "moving among the maps" in Second Life, I’ve been brooding about the perceived lack of browsability in the digital library context. How would we "move among the books" in MBooks?

Things are moving along for our game room. Here you see the workstation desks being installed and wired.

You may have noticed that the links to Google Books in Mirlyn have a little more information lately. We have always provided links to online copies in both Google Book Search and MBooks. We're now using the Google API to provide links to any book in Mirlyn that is also in Google Book Search.

I'll be speaking as part of a panel at tomorrow's Newbie Librarian unConference at the Southfield (MI) Public Library. My plan for my portion of the panel is to use the Computer & Video Game Archive at the library as an object example, detailing the various skills I have employed in developing the collection: What did I learn back in library school that I never thought I'd have to use, but did? What didn't I learn in school, but had to do? And so on. The unconference runs all day; my panel starts at 2:30.

This is a prototype wordmark for the game archive, designed by our most excellent Library Communications Specialist, Liene Karels. Besides going on promotional materials and the like, we'll also have it stenciled on the new glass wall for the archive room.

Meant to mention this earlier.... We are hiring for the position of the Computer & Video Game Archive Manager at the library. This is a staff position, non-professional, non-technical. Basically it is to manage the day-to-day activities of the archive, including staffing the service desk, troubleshooting basic problems, managing a couple of student employees, etc. For the complete posting, go to Careers at the University of Michigan, select the appropriate job search section, and look for posting #20959. The posting is open until the end of the week.

Over the past year we've been developing a new collection building tool to be used in conjunction with the MBooks "page-turning" application already available. This tool will allow users to create their own collections of MBooks items and view public collections created by others. Users will also be able to do full text searching across all items within a collection.

With this blog I hope to not only talk about our upcoming Computer & Video Game Archive here at the MLibrary, but also document my exploration into the relatively-new-to-me world of games in the academy. First up is The Education Arcade at MIT.