Library Blogs

From the July 2009 issue of Scientific American: “A pernicious excitement to learn and play [this game] has spread all over the country, and numerous clubs for practicing this game have been formed in cities and villages. Why should we regret this? It may be asked. We answer, [this game] is a mere amusement of a very inferior character, which robs the mind of valuable time that might be devoted to nobler acquirements, while it affords no benefit whatever to the body..."

The Computer & Video Game Archive will be closed Thursday & Friday July 2-3.

Robin Burkinshaw created a homeless family in Sims 3 and has been blogging their story at Alice and Kev: The story of being homeless in The Sims 3. Start at the beginning; you'll find their story fascinating and sometimes heartbreaking.

Local gaming store Get Your Game On is now a University of Michigan vendor, so I went down there this afternoon and picked out some old games for the archive: Atari, Intellivision, Genesis, NES, SNES, PS1, etc. A big thanks to Manager John for all his help!

A major milestone for the HathiTrust partners was reached on April 27, 2009 as we released a temporary beta catalog for the digital library, offering bibliographic search (title, author, subject, ISBN, publisher, and year of publication) and faceted browse of all items in HathiTrust. The catalog is built using the open source VuFind software and is temporary, pending the release of permanent catalog to be built by OCLC in conjunction with a HathiTrust partner team.

After a long absence, the HP Blackbird 002 is back up and running, so you all can play your PC games again!

The archive will be on reduced hours for the spring/summer. Starting April 27, the archive will be open M-F Noon - 7pm.

This weekend's On the Media show from NPR has a segment about the rise of independent console game developers: "DIY Gaming"

We finally got an ethernet line run down next to the large flat panel display. The Xbox 360 is online and ready to go (though the PS3 still doesn't connect properly). So if you want to play online Halo 3 on the large 46" screen, you can! We also added a new Nintendo DSi this week, for your handheld gaming pleasure.

Little power surges/spikes were running through campus today, including the Duderstadt Center where the game archive lives. The only thing we seem to have lost is one of the base stations for the remote headphones; it still charges, but no longer gets a signal from the tv. Luckily we have a couple of back-up base stations, so all is well.