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I'm off to Texas this sunday for a whirlwind Texas Library Gaming Roadshow, as this completely incredible flyer produced by the South Texas Library System details.  Along with Erin Helmrich, I'll be doing workshops in Edinburg, Austin, and San Antonio.  I'm particularly excited to visit Austin during the start of bat season!

This will be my third trip to Texas in the past year; those Texas consortia are gung-ho for gaming!  It should be a very fun trip and I'm looking forward to meeting our hosts and our attendees.

Stay tuned for updates… 

Hello Blog, How’ve you been?

I was invited to speak at ALA 2006 by Jed Moffitt, IT Director at KCLS. When I was there in April, Jed took me to XXX Root Beer Drive-In for lunch, which I had seen on boingboing a few weeks previously. It was a fantastic place, and the frozen mugs were quite enormous. Visiting New Orleans at this stage in its recovery, I was led to expect desolation, complete with tumbleweeds, but there was traffic, and a sense of normalcy, excepting the omnipresent tarps and trailers. The airport was a little unsettling, however, deserted, with closed shops and squashed palmetto bugs; but on the way downtown from the airport we passed an oil change place with an LED sign reading ‘Welcome Librarians’.

If I had been there before, I might feel differently, but things seemed ok downtown to me, there was a vibrancy that I was not expecting. A lot of tourist shops were only open because of ALA, and there was lots of construction, but about the biggest inconvenience I experienced during the trip was having to wait for silverware. Being in the French Quarter on a Saturday night was quite an amalgam of sounds and smells, although Erin told me it always smelled like that. I was surprised to find 80’s rock as the dominant live music on Bourbon Street; I actually heard two different bands play Jessie’s Girl near-simultaneously.

Every meal was just amazing, I had étouffée at The Gumbo Shop twice, and fried boudin at Cochon twice, and had corned beef hash with creole hollendaise; the only thing I wanted to try but didn’t get a chance to was a Beignet. Cochon was really an incredible meal; I went there for lunch, and it was so delicious, I went back for dinner, with Jenny Levine, Kathryn Deiss, and Chad Haefele. We had a wonderful waiter named Nathan, who recommended that we get the hamhock, that none of us would have otherwise ordered, and it was just amazing, falling off the bone and all that. I asked Nathan for a breakfast recommendation, and he suggested Stanley (brother to sister-restaurant Stella) where I had the creole corned beef hash mentioned above. I then saw him the next night at Hagen-Dahs right off of Jackson Square (I was having a Mayan Milkshake) and got to thank him for his recommendation and meet his girlfriend and her very cute dog.

Outside the carnival of free crap of the exhibit hall, I was sitting on a bench in the convention center concourse, making some tweaks to my presentation, and a guy comes and sits down to my right and opens his laptop too. Someone walking by looked at the bench, and said, "Hey, it’s like that commercial! You’re the Mac, and you’re the PC!" From his perspective, I was on the right, in my tshirt and rumply blazer with cargo pants and sneakers, and beard and too much hair, with my Mac, and this other guy was on the left, with a dell PC in his lap, dark suit, tie, clean-shaven, and slicked-back. We both lauged, and then the guy said "What are you working on?"

PC Guy: "A Sales Spreadsheet"
Me: "A Videogame Presentation"

I wanted to get a picture, but Mr. PC left shortly thereafter. If only he had sneezed, we could have uploaded it to youtube.

My presentation was opposite a somewhat surprise appearance by Laura Bush, but we still had well over 100 in our session. Jed had asked me to speak for about an hour, and although I lost one lady in the first 2 minutes, it was a very fun and receptive audience. Matt Gullett then talked about all the cool classes and stuff he’d done at Bloomington before his recent move to join Kelly Czarnecki at the amazing Imaginon in Charlotte. Kevin Ferst talked about starting a gaming service as a nongamers, and Beth then talked about Reader’s advisory for gamers (and said I talked in Sound Bites =).

I also went to a YALSA gaming discussion group and got to meet some other people doing gaming events of all types and talk about some of the issues.

The exhibit hall is really quite striking simply for the sheer expense it represents. I can’t help but wonder how much more we pay for every single thing we buy to fund that sort of bonanza. Especially because it seems that it only exists because we, as customers, are too lazy to do our homework. We can only shop at the mall. It is a little unsettling that a trade show is a sign of normalcy. I did notice the booth that sold rolling suitcases you could use to store all the crap you were picking up, and quite a lot of people were pulling them around. I only picked up a few pieces of crap from the exhibits, the best thing being a CD sample of Shel Silverstein’s work of genius, Runny Babbit.

The hospitality was incredible, the food amazing, it was very hot, and just a wonderful trip. It’s hard to understand the devastation when it’s hidden from view and everything seems so normal. Life goes on.

Last week, I visited the King County Library System to present two gaming workshops to KCLS staff. KCLS has developed a fantastic initiative to get some gaming hardware out to some of their 44 branches without pushing anyone too far outside their comfort zone.

One of the exciting things about this initiative is that it started at the top; KCLS Director Bill Ptacek returned from ALA last year all fired up about gaming, and set KCLS Teen Coordinator Barbara Carmody to develop a program. Barbara initially thought it was a terrible idea; now, a few months later, she has asked for and received a PS2 for Christmas (and is expecting a dance pad for Mother’s Day), is addicted to Katamari Damacy, and is eagerly anticipating Brain Age on DS. Barbara’s enthusiasm for the project is infectious, and her genuine interest in the games teens want to play gives the entire program a solid foundation.

With around $50,000 (out of a $71 million budget) to work with, Barbara has put together a set of well-varied gaming kits for branches of different sizes of capabilities, and the first are rolling out now. The local newspaper ran a typically terrible article (that Barbara saved) about the initiative, complete with the old strategy guide chestnut, photo of crazed teenage library volunteer, and an honest-to-god, threat-or-menace lede. The article prompted a great letter (of support) to the editor from a patron, and even picked up an elusive (and slightly derisive) kotaku post.

The article touches on what my dad might call the salami issue; there’s only so much salami to go around, and a common complaint is that doing something frivolous like a gaming program takes salami away from worthier pursuits. As a public library, any use of salami that involves the public actually eating the salami is an appropriate, even optimal, use of the salami. You might even say that the best uses of the salami are those where the highest percentage of salami reaches the public; those with the lowest salami overhead.  New salami delivery systems that are able to deliver salami to consumers who historically haven’t gotten their fair share of that public salami have a value to the public organization greater than simply the amount of salami they deliver.

Gaming events are salami for gamers. It’s what they want. Public libraries have an important role in promoting literacy, but there’s also this other big system of learning institutions, and that’s kind of their turf, you know? Our relationships with our patrons do not need to be exclusively pedantic; as public libraries, we have a recreational component to our mission, so putting a higher value on — and providing more salami to — the kids who like to write for fun as opposed to the kids who like to play videogames for fun is making a value judgement about how they spend their leisure time. Most of our mission statements make it pretty clear that we’re not supposed to do that. Not everyone is a writer, not everyone is a recreational reader. We can bemoan their tastes, we can try to change them, but it’s their library too.

But I digress, sheesh. The wonderful thing about the workshops at KCLS is that I think some minds were changed. Even some of the voices from the article were playing Mario Kart and warming to the concept. KCLS has been doing open plays and having good success; one of my goals was to give them some ideas and encourage them to take the next step and do some tournaments. Open play is a great place to start, especially when you’re just getting used to setting thing up and handling a new audience; but some issues that rapidly crop up during open play, such as kids getting bored of games and wanting to switch every 5 minutes, or just not sharing and playing nice, are totally eliminated when holding a tournament.

For example, when we do open play at AADL, most players will only play mario kart for 15-20 minutes before wanting to switch to another game. However, in our tournament format, we’re about to start our third consecutive year of playing Mario Kart and the players are eager for more. The excitement of a tournament introduces a new level to the title that open play can’t touch.

So, after some scenes from our DVD, and some discussion about built-in tournament modes and simple excel-based tournaments, people seemed less daunted by the prospect of organizing a tournament, and hopefully, more convinced that games have a place at the library. There’s a lot more to talk about from this trip, but it’s great to see a big system taking such bold steps!

Library Camp is coming up at AADL on Friday, April 14th. This event is an unconference using the open space format, which throws several much-needed wrenches into the typical conventions of, well, conventions. First, instead of suffering through a dull or irrelevant session, looking for a polite chance to ditch, you are encouraged — even required — to walk out of any session you find unproductive or uninteresting. Also, no pre-arranged agenda. One of the first things we’ll do at the event is propose some sessions and put together the schedule for the day based on who’s there and what they’re looking for.

In the meantime, I’ve thought of a few things that might be interesting sessions for the event. There is a great group of people coming, and I think it’s a great opportunity to actually produce some things. So, here are my ideas for sessions:

• Library 2.0: Threat or MENACE? (What does it mean, what’s to come?)
• Tags in the OPAC: the roles and balance of taxonomies and folksonomies
• IM applications in Libraries, current and potential
• Reclaiming Serendipity: Lost Features of the card catalog that OPACs should offer
• DRM and the future of library downloads
• Gaming in the library: thinking big
• Library Podcasting: Projects and Possibilities
• Netflix and other alternate circulation schemes
• Stats and metrics: new ways to collect and analyze use data
• Online community building: starting points and brainstorming
• hackfest?
• collaborative authoring of a document, maybe a guide to library 2.0 tools?

The idea is that sessions are interactive, more of a collaborative effort than a presentation, and I think we’ll try to make sure that there are bloggers in each session, and that posts are tagged accordingly. I’ve posted these ideas on the Library2 wiki, so please add to and modify this list.

Also at AADL on the 14th is the first-ever AADL-GT Retro Octathalon, an olympic-style event for all ages where all competitors will compete for overall and single-event high scores on 8 vintage (pre-1990) video games, with a championship for the highest scorers at the end of the night. Adult qualifiers start at 6, so you can attend Library Camp all day, and then give your thumbs some much-needed exercise.

These are going to be two very cool events, and a very busy day!

What better evidence could there possibly be of the natural compatibility of videogames and libraries than this short video of a couple of college kids dressed up as videogame characters, running through a library, screaming? Even better, it takes place at the University of Michigan UgLi and Fishbowl, just down the street. I wish they tried this at AADL, although the security staff would probably not be amused.

[Via Kotaku, previously at Boingboing]

Dave at KCPL posts a great set of library gaming goals, and the establishment of a Gaming Task Force. They will use force. To accomplish tasks. Hence, a task force.

Kansas City’s downtown branch is a beautifully restored bank, and one of his notes is for a Game Vault… they are uniquely equipped to provide this service. He also talks about networking matches across libraries. We are planning on testing a multi-branch console network at the AADL-GT planning meeting next weekend, with 4 mario kart stations at Malletts Creek Branch, and 4 downtown. We have gigabit fiber between branches, and with the magic of VLANs, we can create a network for the 8 gamecubes that has ports at both locations.

At AADL, we have gigabit fiber directly to Merit, and we are connected to Internet2. If another library would have a low-latency, high-speed connection, we may be able to do mario kart cross-country, using Warp Pipe, which allows you to route gamecube LAN traffic over the internet. When you do this (which is not supported by Nintendo), the speed of the race is essentially limited by the speed of your internet connection. Ping aadl.org and check your time… if you get below 30 milliseconds, let’s talk.

Internet2 is always looking for cool new killer apps for the Abilene network; it would be great to use this fantastically fast backbone to schlep 6 megabits per second of banana peels and master shells across the country, instead of all the same old telerobotic surgeries and cello master classes.