Library Blogs

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.

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.