Library Blogs

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.

The Usability Working Group (UWG), along with our 2 fantastic and hardworking interns, is spending the summer conducting usability research on MTagger. We started by doing a heuristic evaluation and cognitive walkthrough. The goal for these evaluations was to reveal a preliminary set of issues pertaining to the usability, functionality and aesthetics of MTagger and to facilitate prioritizing further benchmarks. This report is now online.

We get questions from MBooks users (most recently from dfulmer in the comments to this post) about how to link to pages, what the URL parameters such as "num" and "seq" mean, and other questions about links and page numbers.

One of the ways we plan on growing the video game archive is through in-kind donations. How many people have old game consoles taking up space in the basement, looking for a good home? Quite a few, we think, and we can offer that good home to them! I have a page up on our Website with details on what we're looking for and who to contact.

I thought it might be interesting to share our collection plan for the video game collection. Below you'll find a large portion of the original collection plan that we wrote last November. A few things have changed since then as far as specifics, but it's still largely what we plan to do.

As I mentioned in my previous post, we're creating a computer & video game archive at the library. This will be a working archive, with the various game systems set up and available for use. We're converting a space for the game room. Previously it was used for photocopiers and as a sorting area for bound journals. Those elements have been moved elsewhere in the library, and now we have a big empty space...

Hi! My name's Dave. I'm a librarian at the University of Michigan, and this is my new blog. The focus of this blog will be on computer and video games in libraries, specifically academic libraries. Often even more specifically, my library. That's because we're preparing to open a Computer and Video Game Archive at my library, the University of Michigan Art, Architecture & Engineering Library, on the second floor of the Duderstadt Center on North Campus.

Earlier this week, I had a chance to give a brown-bag session on a new API into our catalog, Mirlyn (Ex Libris's Aleph software).

At the University of Michigan Library, in partnership with Google, we have been busily scanning our collections. This opens up lots of possibilities, including an exciting one that launches today: search the full text of a book from within Mirlyn, the library's catalog.

MLibrary Labs is the University Library's test bed and playground. Here's a summary of all the tools that have been released since we launched it in September 2007.