Library Blogs

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.)

Yesterday I cracked open one of our Nintendo Entertainment Systems to replace the pin connector which had gone bad. I was successful, so now we have two working NESes (and also an NES clone).

We finally got our logo sign up on the window of the archive.

There's an interview with me regarding the Comptuer & Video Game Archive over at The Video Game Librarian blog. Thanks to John Scalzo for his excellent interview!

Today's Michigan Daily features another article about the video game archive: "Archive brings games old and new to students."

Immediately after the HathiTrust announcement, one blog said that we'd built the digital library but forgot the front door. Why? Because there was no search functionality included in the initial release. Large scale search has always been a goal and we now have the first attempt at meeting that goal.

Oh the joys of running a usable archive! Some of the technical difficulties we've run into over the last couple of weeks.

I'm taking a rare stint right now as the monitor in the Game Archive (typically it is staffed by student workers).

Search is a hard problem. I take it for granted because I have things like Google and Lucene available to me. But it is a difficult problem, and it's made more difficult when you're not actually allowed to go around and index everything you want to search. Furthermore this difficulty is compounded when you want to repeat this search in multiple locations, and then combine the results.