Library Blogs

Julia Lange, a doctoral student who has been making occasional use of the CVGA for her research, was at E3 earlier this summer, and shared with us a few photos she snapped with her cellphone: Thanks Julia!

Authored by Joanna Price: Your friendly CVGA intern, here, to tell you about a new and exciting group. The Computer and Video Game Archive is proud to host a Girls' Gaming Group, the 2nd and 4th Thursday evenings of every month, from 6-9 PM at the archive. Beginners welcome! If you're interested, please join our Facebook group.

The organizers of the annual Classic Gaming Expo - John Hardie, Sean Kelly, and Joe Santulli - have a mission. They want to start a physical museum that collects everything about classic games - every version of every game, design & developer notes, promotional materials, backups of unreleased games, etc.  The exact location is yet to be determined, but San Jose, CA is their stated goal.

Today we released the third high priority feature identified by the HathiTrust Full-text Search Working Group: relevance ranking for "Search in this text."

We recently had the opportunity to host a social event for the A2 GeekTour, whose aim is to create "a chance for geeks to get together and explore a physical space that has some claim to geekdom." Highlights included the group experiencing moments of nostalgia as they checked out our Atari games and some of the older equipment, as well as an opportunity for them to rock out with a few Rock Band songs, complete with the string guitar controller.

On July 27th, we went live with faceted search and relevance ranking based on both OCR and MARC metadata in Full-Text Search in HathiTrust.

For those who are interested in working at the archive, now is the time to apply! Go to the Student Employment website and apply using the online system (Job ID 21972).

Here are our top games from last month. A class project involving Okami and a fan of the Jak & Daxter series have brought some new names to the list.

The Hand Eye Society will be running two game incubators in Toronto over the next several months, both of which focus on making it easier for women to get involved in creating video games. The group aims to get more underrepresented groups involved in game creation, and is working to dispel certain myths about game development that prevent people from trying it out, such as the assumption that developers have to be experienced in programming and mathematics. According to their article in the Torontoist, anyone who has "completed a project in a creative medium" is eligible to participate.

Several months ago, the library’s Usability Working Group and User Experience Department completed a review of the way large academic libraries present combined search results on their web site. That review was the first phase in a process to help us revise the way we presented our combined search results with an end goal of deciding whether or not to include results from our article discovery environment in the mix with everything else.