we prefer video games
advocacy
Your homework!
01 year ago
Hey 8bitlibrarians,
I’m teaching a webinar today for Infolink, NJ’s regional library cooperative, titled “Pokemon, Learning, and Libraries”. Once the talk is archived I’ll pop the link in this post for all to see!
Here’s the “homework” from the talk. This stuff is valuable even if you aren’t going to the webinar:
Let’s start with the link to Bulbapedia. Those guy are terrific!
Next is an amazingly inspirational talk about what motivates us as humans, send to me by the fantastic @pcsweeney.
Next up is video-games-in-schools guru James Paul Gee talking about how the communities that video game players build are effectively identical to our professional communities.
In the September 15, 2010 issue of New York Times Magazine, they ran a cover story on “Learning by Playing“.
James Paul Gee again, on the PBS show Frontline, describing how video games can help schools (and how the modern library could be considered “competition” to traditional schooling.)
My article in Booklist on starting a video game collection & running video game programming in your library.
And, last but not least, the slides, which look strange in the Google Doc viewer:
Cranky Kong responds to Michael Gorman
10
I hear the American Library Association is holding another National Gaming Day tomorrow. There’ll be a national Super Smash Brother Brawl Tournament? In my day, brawls meant something. We brawled over ideas like women’s suffrage (a brawl I lost, but I digress). Tournaments ended in someone getting eaten by a lion. I hear no one even dies in this “game” you call “Smash Brothers”.
I also hear they will be playing a game called “Rock Band”. In my day, bands were rubber and rocks were used to throw at people who didn’t share our opinions. That game was very fun, and I can’t imagine this new fangled video version of a game could give you quite the same experience as a good old-fashioned stoning.
In my day, we didn’t have video games in our libraries. We didn’t even have video games. The only games we played were boring. That’s why we call them board games. Our most exciting game was “kick the can”, yet the 8bitlibrary.com bloggers didn’t even host a single game of kick the can at their Retro Gaming Day. You librarians nowadays have no sense of history and no moral compass.
Speaking of librarians nowadays, I WHOLEHEARTEDLY SUPPORT FORMER AMERICAN LIBRARY ASSOCIATION PRESIDENT MICHAEL GORMAN’S STATEMENT THAT GAMES DON’T HAVE ANYTHING TO DO WITH LIBRARIES. I agree with him when he says it is ludicrous to think “that all these young people would turn up to play video games and think, ‘Oh by the way, I must borrow that book by Dostoyevsky’.” In my day, libraries were full of books and children only spoke when spoken to.
You know what else libraries didn’t have? James Patterson books. If there is anything to me signaling the end of the world, it is “his” books, oh, and and sparkly vampires. In my day, vampires didn’t sparkle and didn’t eat garlic.
I also hear libraries have computers now. I find it ludicrous to think that people are going to pick up a Dostoevsky book after clicking around on one of those satanic machines. In my day, we read Dostoevsky by candle-light in the library (because electric lighting wasn’t around yet). I’m tired of electric lighting in libraries, come to think of it, because it ruins my experience of reading Dostoevsky.
You know what else libraries didn’t have in my day? Heating and air conditioning. I find no need for it. In my day we burned witches at the stake for heat in the winter. My late wife Bertha could attest to this.
One of the worst things of all that I find coming out of today’s libraries is their dependence on the internet. They are helping people navigate the “information” that flows through this terrible series of tubes? I’ve seen what happens to you when you use too much internet, and I hope I’m not around when the sky rains chocolate. In my day, the only information we could trust was in books written by Dostoevsky, and this fact will never change.
Let me conclude by saying: Michael Gorman, I salute you and your courage to stand up against these whipper-snapping librarians of today. They are ruining what we love so much: stuffy quiet library spaces that no longer serve a purpose to our community!!
- Cranky Kong
(this is posted by JP on behalf of Cranky Kong, who is NOT in Super Smash Brother Brawl)
More on violent video game U.S. Supreme Court case
0Quote: Where do you stop? What about violent books, violent movies?
Supreme Court Justices Debate Video Game Ban
1NY Times: Justices Debate Video Game Ban
Let’s make the connection between Banned Books Week and this article.
“What’s a deviant violent video game?” asked Justice Antonin Scalia, who was the law’s most vocal opponent on Tuesday. “As opposed to what? A normal violent video game?”
“Some of the Grimm’s fairy tales are quite grim,” he added. “Are you going to ban them, too?”
“How is this any different,” Justice Sonia Sotomayor asked, “than what we said we don’t do in the First Amendment field in Stevens, where we said we don’t look at a category of speech and decide that some of it has low value?”
Justice Alito said the experience of playing a video game was different in kind from reading a book or seeing a movie. He described a game in which players throw their enemies into a meat grinder.
“Reading that is one thing,” he said. “Seeing it as graphically portrayed” is another thing.
“And doing it is still a third thing,” he added.
Where do you stand on content issues in new digital media?
What Eli said…
11 year ago
Part 1
Part 2
If this ideas were a woman, I’d take it to dinner and a movie.
Fighting Fire with Free Speech: Protest Book Burning on 9/11
2In what is emerging as a series on “why I became a librarian”, here’s my next blog post. I started out this series, not realizing at first what it would become, by talking about the ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom’s Banned Books Week Machinima contest. As it turned out, there was a short depiction of book burning, in a video game, included in that post:
Denying people the right to freedom of speech via the burning of media is a pretty anti-American act. Libraries are constantly facing struggles in making sure that information, even information some people want to censor, is available to all.
That brings us to my 2nd post on “why I became a librarian”, and I credited a group of musicians as influencing my future career. You know who is another group of musicians who influenced many people? The Beatles. (this post happens to come on the 1-year anniversary of the release of the first Beatles video game)
How did they deal with this American opposition to their British music? They took the true ideals of America, staging protests and standing up for what is right:
And that brings us back to this post. In the most un-American way possible to remember 9/11, a pastor in Florida will burn copies of the Qu’ran.
In Chicago, the ALA will be staging a protest to this act.
Fighting Fire with Free Speech: ALA Will Protest Book Burning with 9/11 Qur’an Reading
“The librarians of America will not stand by and let ignorance rule,” says ALA Executive Director Keith Michael Fiels. “For every would-be book burner, there are thousands of readers who will speak out for the freedom to peaceably assemble and read whatever they choose.”
Book burning is the most insidious form of book banning, and just as the American Library Association is preparing to celebrate the freedom to read during Banned Books Week, along comes one Rev. Terry Jones of the 50-member Dove World Outreach Center in Gainesville, Florida. The good reverend’s idea of world outreach is to commemorate the 9/11 terrorist attacks of 2001 with a public burning of the Qur’an, the Muslim holy book.The mind-boggling logic behind Jones’s plan has attracted the attention of Muslims and media around the world, and this morning, news sources reported that Gen. David Petraeus had personally pleaded with the reverend to restrain himself because of the potential for retaliatory violence against U.S. troops and citizens overseas that the book burning could provoke.
Meanwhile, the American Library Association and librarians across the country will move the Qur’an to the top of the Banned Books Week agenda. (Leading the way by modeling tolerance, an Oklahoma public library has been hosting an exhibit of artwork inspired by Muslim tradition.)
“Free people read freely,” says Barbara Jones, director of the ALA Office for Intellectual Freedom. “That is a fundamental principle of the American Constitution and a basic mission of public libraries. We don’t burn books, we read them.”
Whether or not the Rev. Jones (who is no relation to ALA’s OIF director) proceeds with his plan, librarians and library advocates will assemble on the steps of the American Library Association headquarters in Chicago this Saturday at 1 p.m. for a public reading from the Qur’an to counteract the burning in Gainesville, and Banned Books Week will launch on September 25 with readings from the Qur’an.
Link to the ALA’s full post on the topic.
PLEASE HELP US HELP THE ALA SPREAD THE WORD BY TWEETING THIS LINK:
http://bit.ly/dgkn2t
This is why we became librarians, folks. Let’s stand up for Freedom of Speech.
Amateur Video Game Composers
11 year ago
Coming off of yesterday’s post about the ALA’s Office of Intellectual Freedom Machinima contest, I decided to talk more about using video games as a medium for creative expression. Yesterday I talked about video games & film, today, video games & music!
Chiptune is a genre of music where the composer and/or performer uses the sounds generated by “retro” video game or computer hardware as the instrument. Instead of playing a guitar or a trumpet or a violin, they play a Gameboy. Or a Commodore 64.
The phrase “8 bit” evokes a certain nostalgic emotion attached to video game culture, which is why the movie we linked to in yesterday’s post was titled 8-bit, why we’re called “The 8bitlibrary”, and where this collective of chiptune musicians get their name:
Before I was a librarian blogger, I was a video gamer. And as such, I got into this crazy genre of music called chiptune. The 8bitpeoples are a collective of musicians who use classic video game hardware to make music and then give it away free on the internet. I actually think they are at least part of the reason why I ended up becoming a librarian: the idea that information and expression should be free (including artistic expression) is one of the core principles of librarianship. The contest that spawned yesterday’s post, and inspired today’s, is thanks to the efforts of the ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom in fact!
8bitlibrary.com is inspired a bit by them as well; while the “8 bit” in the name we took because of its nostalgic nature, and the “library” because of our love for Library Garden et al, the idea of “a collective of creative outside-the-box thinkers” in this field is at least partly inspired by the 8bitpeoples.
This is something librarians should seriously think about as we move forward: we aren’t book depositories. Even things like literacy are only part of what we do. Let’s take our inspiration from a variety of sources. Musicians. Chefs. Artists. I would love to see a wave of librarians who say “I became a librarian because of an example set by a musician“. I had a convo with Allen McGinley on our way down to #ALA10: he said he would love to see a librarian on the cover of Rolling Stone magazine, not as a musician, but as a librarian. I ended up using that as one of my two goals for an exercise we did during an ALA Emerging Leaders event.
Anyway, enjoy some free Chiptune music via the 8bitpeoples:
one of my favorite Christmas Albums, ever:
Who doesn’t love Axel F?
Banned Books Week ’10 Machinima
2As the video game medium grows in cultural importance, it is natural that game players will want to use these communication tools (are they REALLY games?) in creative ways. A good friend of 8bitlibrary.com, filmmaker Justin Strawhand, released a documentary in 2006 titled (appropriately) 8 bit. The trailer for the movie, interestingly enough, includes a shot of an artist who used a video game to depict “book burning”, see if you can catch it about 1 minute in:
The largest movement towards “using video games as to make art” is called Machinima. When you make a Machinima, you record video game characters as your “actors”, the video game is your “set”, and you are the director. Machinima is so popular that the PR campaign for the upcoming game Halo: Reach include humorous machinima commercials using Halo as the tool to make the commercials. Here’s an example of machinima:
And that brings us to the American Library Association’s Office of Intellectual Freedom’s contest:
Banned Books Week 2010: Second Life Machinima Contest
Calling all filmmakers! As part of our celebration of Banned Books Week (BBW) in Second Life this year, we’re inviting everyone to take part in our Banned Books Week Machinima Contest. Machinima is filmmaking within a real-time, 3-D virtual environment like Second Life.
Your inspiration for your machinima entry should be “Think For Yourself and Let Others Do the Same,” the theme for this year’s BBW campaign. Submissions will be accepted between August 22 and September 25, 2010. Participants can enter as many videos as they’d like. The grand prize winner will receive 10,000 Lindens; a BBW 2010 T-shirt; and their video featured on the OIF Blog and in AL Direct. For more information about the contest, including rules and specifications, please click here. For further questions regarding the contest, please contact Tina Coleman (AKA, Kay Tairov in Second Life) via e-mail at ccoleman@ala.org.
You know 8bitlibrary.com will be participating! We will for sure be taking that little clip of a “video game book burning” as inspiration.
Please help us help the OIF spread the word about the contest by tweeting this link: http://bit.ly/deMZui
Librarians (*will be*) taking SXSW by Storm..
11 year ago
…with your awesome assistance…
We in the library <yawn> conference land can gain to learn from the unique panel proposal process at play over at SXSW, sure it takes some coordination and work, but man – does it ever get the community involved, and get people riled up for the conference MONTHS in advance.
Case in point: “They stopped coming?”: Librarians Don’t Cry They Re-View panel proposal
We don’t need to replay all the library X.0 cliches, but we can roughly agree that there are plenty of amazing and radical things about libraries that the public/industry/internet has forgotten about – or at least has slid out of the radar. So here’s an example of taking action in a variety of ways, including cross-pollinating info-related conferences/festivals on the kick-ass-librarian’s agenda. And being good information inseminators, we can bring back the good components to put into play within our own field.
So, go on, take a look at the proposal above – give it a vote if you like it, and toss in a comment about what you’d hope to see, and how you’d like to get involved (they don’t call it INTERACTIVE for nothing). While you’re there, poke around and see what other panel proposals strike your fancy….then we can start ruminating about getting a similar process going within libraryland conferences too – hmmm?
Sooooooo we did get a bit sassy with the write up. If you need some help deciphering, this may help: dating acronyms
Simple & Easy Shared Library Ideas (via Infolink)
21 year ago
Mary Martin, director of the Long Hill Public Library in NJ recently did a poll on the listserv for Infolink, one of our regional library cooperatives in NJ, and the results were so good I had to share them with you 8bitlibrary.com readers! Hope you can pass these ideas on as well!
NJ has a truly great library community.
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Simple & easy shared library ideas – August 2010
Ways to Engage Patrons
Front Desk Raffle
Run a fun contest at the circ desk every few months (e.g. get a quote from a book, display it and have patrons guess origin of quote. Those who guess correctly are entered into a drawing to win something simple (a gift card to Starbucks, DD, etc)
Raffle Ticket Inside Book
Variation of above, but put a “raffle” ticket inside books so people will be surprised when they find the ticket. (Bestsellers, hot movers, etc). The raffle ticket could even ask people for their opinion of the book.
Summer storytime
Does your town have a pool or a lake? There’s no law that says storytime must always be offered at the library. One library does a special storytime at the pool during the summer.
Book Bingo for the Whole Family
“Join us to play Bingo and win a book! All ages welcome, parents and grandparents too! No registration required.” All you need is some refreshments and some books as prizes (they use donated books so there is no cost aside from the refreshments). This has been very popular – the library who ran this had over 70 people in July.
Adult Summer Reading Program
A librarian writes: Based on this year’s water theme, we expended to the elements in general. We asked people to read a book or watch a DVD concerning the elements. We provided a list of suggestions to get them going. For each title, they fill out an entry slip for a drawing. We’ll do a drawing for some mugs at the end of August.
Teen summer reading program
At Long Hill we run both a teen and an adult summer reading program. For each book the patron reads or listens to, they fill out a raffle ticket. We draw winners weekly, and they win either a mug or a book (we use donated books as prizes). At the end of the summer we have one grand prize teen winner and one grand prize adult winner, each win a $25 gift card to Borders. We also offer the option for the patron to review the book, and we post their reviews on our library blog.
Storytime for Grownups
Because why should kids have all the fun?
Blind Date with a Book
In late January/early February, wrap up some books in brown paper, decorate with Valentine’s Day theme and encourage patrons to choose one to take home. Long Hill did this last year, it was fun and patrons enjoyed the opportunity to check out a book they might not otherwise have chosen.
Happy Holidays from the Library Staff!
Engage the staff by asking them to recommend holiday or winter themed books or DVDs. Then create a bookmark with their recommendations and give it out to library patrons.
Sharing Our Knowledge w/ Patrons
Staff Picks/May We Recommend?
Display backlist titles or staff picks that people may not have had a chance to read, at the front desk. You’d be surprised at how the staff picks fly off the desk. One caveat: pick books that are in good shape with interesting cover art. They are more likely to catch patrons’ interest.
If You Like cards in the stacks near popular authors
“If you like James Patterson you might also like….” these have been very popular at our library, I am happy to share the cards with anyone who wants to use and/or modify them.
Help patrons find their way around Nonfiction with shelf end cards that include not only the Dewey numbers but the subject patrons will find within that Dewey range – e.g 910.202 – 940.54 Geography, Travel, Ancient History or 600 – 618.24 Nutrition & diets, health & medicine
Recent Returns cart
In front of the circ desk, we have a cart where we put recently returned new books. We deliberately put the cart next to the book drop at the desk, because right after people drop off their old set of books is when they’re looking for new stuff to read. It cuts down on shelving, gives people a smaller section of books to browse.
“Bestsellers You Haven’t Read Yet”
Create a new section right next to New Fiction (or even use a folding bookcase or cart in front of the circ desk) with colorful books by big authors (Grisham, Roberts, Patterson, Picoult etc). You could even do a variation on the theme and do a “Best Books You Haven’t Heard Of” or a “Staff Picks” section. Assign someone to keep the display fresh and replenish it when necessary.
Get those oversized books circulating!
A librarian writes: “One thing we do is combine our browsing shelf with two lower shelves, and we choose a selection of oversized books there. Our oversized books tend not to go out as much as the other books, mainly because they are shelved separately. By showcasing them, not only do they go out, but people will go to the oversize shelves more than before.”
Oversized art books
One library I visited has a special set of shelving near the circ desk where they display oversized art books. As soon as they created this special section, the circulation of this type of book skyrocketed.
Summer Reading Lists
Make sure you have printouts of the local schools’ summer reading lists (both required, and recommended), and put them in binders. It may also be nice to post links to the reading lists on your library’s web site. We didn’t have the K – grade 5 recommended reading lists printed out until one of our staff members mentioned that she was getting a lot of requests for them. So I talked to the elementary school librarian and got the lists, then printed them & posted on our website.
Creative use of volunteers
Reading Buddies (teen volunteers)
Teen volunteers come in to read to little kids. Great all year round but especially during the summer when you have all those teens who want to volunteer
Computer Tutors (adult volunteers with computer skills)
Adult volunteers who have computer skills come to the library once a week at a set time, and help whoever comes in with their questions. It’s been very successful at Westwood Library and they’ve gotten great feedback from their patrons.
Another library described a similar program, PC Tutoring. They offer one-on-one computer tutoring to patrons twice a month, on several PC basics.
Better Communication with Patrons
Ask patrons for help in maintaining your collection
Patrons complaining about DVDs, audio CDs not working properly? You can create a simple slip asking patrons “Help us keep our collection in good repair” and including checkmarks where they can indicate what is wrong with the item. Then train staff to look for those checkmarks when an item is returned. And clean/repair item before it is reshelved.
Ask for what you need in your answering machine message
At Long Hill, we noticed that when people left messages for us at the front desk they usually failed to give us the info we needed (e.g. if it was a renewal) or they would be crystal clear in their message up until they told us their last name, which always ended up sounding like “Blarfengar.” So we changed our answering message to say “We’re sorry we missed your call. Please leave a message with your name, and please spell out your last name for us. Provide your phone number and your request. We’ll return your call as soon as we can.” This friendly message that clearly tells them what info we needed from them. It has cut down on the head-scratching we were doing when we checked our messages.
“You don’t have enough mysteries.”
One librarian writes: I met an elderly gentleman at a community event. He told me he stopped using our library because we didn’t have many mysteries. When I asked him for more details I learned that he thought the only mysteries we owned were on the New Book shelves. So now we have a sign on our New Mysteries shelves that says “We have over 7,500 mystery novels and many others available from other libraries at no charge…”
Cheap Advertising/Marketing
Use printable business cards to advertise services. For instance, if you want to promote Reference USA you can print business cards and hand them out to business patrons for them to file in their wallet, where they might actually have a chance of finding it when they need it.
Contact your local newspaper and find out if they have “community blogs.” Long Hill’s local newspaper encouraged us to start a blog with them. We use it to promote library events and what is interesting is that the newspaper staff read our blog, so occasionally they will print an article in the paper about the library even though we didn’t send them a press release – they just take the info from our blog.
At Long Hill we get BookPage book review magazine (for patrons) and we subscribe to the NextReads database (providing 21+ book related email newsletters people can sign up for.) When BookPage comes we put a sticker on it saying “Like what you read here? Sign up for NextReads for even more great recommendations.” To increase use of NextReads newsletters we also created easy sign up sheets and put them all around the library (including in our New Book binder) to encourage people to sign up. (We also use NextReads for our monthly children’s events email newsletter.)
Tax Forms
As you know the State of New Jersey stopped providing tax forms and instructional booklets this year. One of Long Hill’s staff members suggested we print out a couple copies of the instructional booklet, put them in binders and allow patrons to check them out for 7 days. This was a great way for us to serve the patrons
Easy Technology Tools
A librarian writes “We are a small library and only have 4 public Internet computers. We also have a large number of latchkey kids. This summer we decided to implement separate adult and juvenile usage times. Adults get their time on the computers from 10:30 to 12:30 and kids get their time from 2 to 4. Now we don’t have adults complaining about the noisy kids at the computers with them, and can guarantee that kids won’t be bothered by adults during their designated time period.”
Digital frame
You can get a cheap digital frame and put pictures from library events on it. Long Hill has this at our front desk. The kids especially are mesmerized by this – they look for themselves and their friends in the pictures.