Library Blogs

As the semester has come to a close, the Comptuer & Video Game Archive will be closed for the intersession. We will open again at Noon on Monday, January 5.

A recent blog pointed out that search is hard when there are many indexes to search because results must be combined. Search is hard for us in DLPS for a different reason. Our problem is the size of the data. The Library has been receiving page images and OCR from Google for a while now. The number of OCR'd volumes has passed the 2 million mark. This raises the question of whether it is possible to provide a useful full text search of the OCR for 2 million volumes. Or more. We are trying to find out.

The Computer & Video Game Archive is featured in an article in today's Detroit Free Press.

I bought a lot of Intellivision games off of eBay for the archive, which were complete in boxes with instruction booklets and overlays.

We received a donation this week of a TI-99/4A computer along with a case full of games. They all work great (except for the fact that the computer keyboard is missing the 'H' key!).

Since the earliest days of MBooks, DLPS has been looking forward to ingesting our previously-digitized page image volumes into the repository. Though it has taken longer than we had hoped, the Historical Math Collection is now available through the HathiTrust Collection Builder interface.

Yesterday was our Grand Opening Event. Food was eaten and games were played. Here are a few photos.

Yesterday morning we got our HP Blackbird 002 set-up in the game room (just in time for the Grand Opening!).

Professor Brad Bushman teaches a senior-level course on video games here at the University (crosslisted in Communication Studies & Psychology). Yesterday afternoon the class took a field trip to the Computer & Video Game Archive to play a bunch of games. The most popular games were Guitar Hero World Tour and MarioKart Wii; also popular were Mario Party, Halo 3, Sonic the Hedgehog, and Super Mario Bros.

One of our graduate students, Meredith Kahn, put together an exhibit of computer and video game items for the display cases in the basement of the Duderstadt Center. (The items are are mostly non-working or currently unused games; boxes/packaging; and books.)