The American Library Association had a booth at the Chicago Comic and Entertainment Expo (C2E2) and I had the pleasure of giving two talks for them, one titled “Connecting Boys With Books Through Graphic Novels, Comics, Gaming, and Movie Ties-Ins“, and another ast-minute fill-in for another speaker who had to split early, “Getting Your Graphic Novel Collection Started: How To Select, Shelve, And Promote Great Lists For Kids, Tweens, Teens, And Adult Collections“. What a great time!

In-between talks, I also had the pleasure of meeting some of the great folks of Chicago attending the convention, as well as spend lots of time with ALA staffers at the booth.

My superhero alter-ego with some of ALA's staff & friends!

So while I was meeting & greeting, the dude from BULBAPEDIA(!!!!!) introduced himself, which was a real thrill, considering I am by far the biggest Pokemon fanboy in all of libraryland.

For those of you unfamiliar with Pokemon or Bulbapedia, Pokemon is the second-most-successful video game franchise of all time, and Bulbapedia (http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/) is the internet’s largest (and most reliable) resource for information relating to everything-Pokemon, including the video games, movies, anime, card-game, and books.

Bulbapedia is, to me, the best example of why video games have belonged in libraries for a long time. Bulbapedia is a user-lead information community, with over 16,000+ encyclopediaesque articles about Pokemon. Wherever information communities exist, library should be present. This is why video games belong in libraries.

To illustrate my point, I’ll use Bulbapedia’s article on the Pokedex (http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/Pokedex). Pokedex is a portmanteau of the words “Pokemon” and “Index”, and indexing is one of our most basic library skills. The article goes on to use these other library related terms when describing the Pokedex:

  • information
  • database
  • list
  • data
  • number sequence
  • software
  • order
  • organize
  • record

8bitlibrary.com's founder JP with Bulbapedia's Editor-in-Chief TTEchidna.

I can go on about why video game collections are important for library advocacy, why being involved with/around projects like Bulbapedia are important for Information Literacy efforts, etc etc etc, but I won’t ;-P

I encourage you to get familiar with Bulbapedia. The video games-in-libraries ideas will quickly follow.