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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!

John’s brilliant post skipped over a critical gulf-spanning technique, one that I would have thought he would have included, as he has personal experience with the approach:

Make a movie.

One of the challenges IT departments can face as they grow, especially in the library world, is muggle staff not understanding what all those geeks actually do. Often, the borders of IT responsibility could make a gerrymanderer blush, and since most IT work is done in our dank recesses, far below the hustle and bustle of the patron-filled surface world, delivering a clear understanding of who does what can be complicated by the fact that some staff may not know who these people are that, summoned by a submit button, emerge, blinking, only to immediately disappear under the table. That leads to unfamiliarity, and you know what they say about unfamiliarity: it breeds discontent. Wait, that’s not right. But it sounds good.

So, to address this unfamiliarity, we produced the IAS Television Showcase (quicktime) in the Fall of 2002, to be shown at our annual staff day. While it was intended to give a little information about what we do, I really hoped that it would help the rest of the staff feel more personally familiar with all of us. We shot it on a Friday, and I edited it over the weekend, getting a precious copy rendered and printed to tape just in time for the opening bagels Monday morning. I remember that we were missing a cable we needed when it was time for the premiere (first thing after lunch), so we had to tie a dv camera to the pole above the projector. We couldn’t find the remote for the camera, so I introduced the movie, and then stood on a chair to push play and roll the tape. Sort of a live juryrigging demonstration, if you will.

The audience loved it, and I think it really did help them know us a little bit better. That was a long time ago already, and it’s amazing how much things have changed since then. Just seeing the server room during Joe Harris’ System Spec, or some of the hot new acronyms showcased in Modern Major Geekerel, makes me slightly damp with nostalgia. The gadget rundown, somewhat obscure then, looks positively archaic now. We should do Television Showcase 2.0. I should also find the DV tape that has the finished version and capture a better copy, as Premiere eating the source file for this project was one of my last straws with Windows.

While something like this will take a little time to produce, the potential return on your time is probably far better than even the most productive bilateral committee meeting. Plus, it’s fun. Libraries should be fun. Enjoy!

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.

John Scalzo reports on the first year of his circulating game collection at Mysterious Public Library (MPL). That post went all the way to the top last week, and I’m hopeful that this growing awareness that games belong in the library will start to drive more demand and less funny looks.

Interestingly, his hottest title was Harry Potter 2. I wonder if this is just because there are more Potter fans in the library (duh), or if it also caught the eye during searches for the books, especially since the titles probably didn’t spend much time on the shelf. Katamari Damacy also makes the top 10. I really wanted to use Katamari multiplayer as a surprise round game last season. Maybe someday…

Kotaku’s post back at Scalzo’s 6-month mark said he had sold the MPL administration on supporting the ps3 at launch, although his first year wrapup sounds less convinced about it. It really depends on the intersection between library patrons and early adopters. I think that a lot of the people in my town who are likely to shell out $500 on launch day probably have no clue what the library is doing. We’ve got to change that.

Now that John’s gone and leaked some departmental jargon, I reserve the right to use the term ‘muggles’ in reference to users. It’s really not so much jargon, as it is a familiar framework for analogies in discussions at the office.

Our geekly powers aren’t really magical, but in accordance with Clarke’s Third Law, magic is in the eye of the beholder. They are muggles because we seem like wizards to them; the muggleness is all in the head. Seriously, which is easier to explain: Wingardium Leviosa, or AJAX?

“If we’re arguing over semantics, we’ve been derailed.” Thus spake John Blyberg, and he says those sorts of things in meetings all the time, and takes the wind out of some magnificently superfluous tangents. He’s absolutely right, and the kerfuffle about the term (and the ideas of) ‘Library 2.0‘ could have been easily foreseen by the sufficiently jaded.

While I think the term is undeniably here to stay, there are a few factors that are kerfuffulating the issue that could stand to be aired out a bit.

Library 2.0 implies not only enhancement, but also inclusion.

Ever since we started banging those rocks together, we’ve been learning that newer is usually better. There will always be missteps, like Asbestos Pyjamas, or Windows ME, and not everyone is going to agree, like Buggy Whip Sellers, Travel Agents, or Torah Scribes, but the march forward over time has been, well, inexorable, at least in regards to technology. In the information age, programmer’s version control schemes were rapidly seized upon as a marketing device that presented an easy way to communicate both newness and essentiality. Procter and Gamble’s marketing people probably wish they could just release ‘Crest 4.2!’ instead of having to come up with a new phrase each time like ‘now with more whitening detartarizing sparkleoid microbead blaster POWER’, that has to be legible at a small size and at a distance, amongst a field of competing holographic sparkles.

So, yes, product 2.0 (or at least product 2.1) is almost always better than product 1.0, but that doesn’t mean that product 1.0 was bad (although it may have been). Not only that, but product 2.0 had better include almost all the features of product 1.0, or offer superior alternatives. There are no vestiges of the old republic to be swept away; product 2.0 is not inherently a coup. It’s the next iteration of the idea, building on the successes of product 1.0 and learning from its weaknesses. While product 2.0 may involve a complete restructuring of the backend if 1.0 was klugey or unscalable, I haven’t heard anyone say that the Library 2.0 idea involves that sort of institutional razing. We’re just talking about what our institutions should do next; the baby, she’s still soaking in it. You know, the bathwater.

It probably ought to be Library 7.0 or something.

Part of the kerfuffulation comes from the Library 2.0’s inference that these new ideas are the shiny new one true path version, and the history of Libraries up to this point are the old hat version. While it’s true that the new services (and more importantly, the new approach to service development) that Library 2.0 entails are enough of a jump from current practice to merit the next integer in the sequence, compressing the changes libraries have been through over the centuries into a single version can be seen as belittling or dismissive if taken too seriously.

So, what version of Library are we running here, anyway?

Okay, call cuneiform Library 1.0, after the oral tradition alpha and cave wall beta. The shift to paper-based books surely merited Library 2.0, and the Greeks’ addition of Fiction Collections in 500 BCE ushered in the era of Library 3.0. The Han Dynasty’s addition of a catalog, stored in silk bags, brought us to library 4.0, while the Romans brought a key innovation to Library 5.0: open stacks, a feature that would disappear from some future releases. The threat of shrinkage drove the medieval libraries to bring an interesting concept to Library 6.0; loss prevention in the form of chaining the books to the shelves. Maybe it’s time for that idea to come around again. Gutenberg forced reinvention into Library 7.0 as the precious became commodity (and as the Torah Scribes cried ‘Feh’), and maybe we can skip a bit to the expansion of the Carnegie era and call that Library 8.0. I think you can call the integration of events and programming into the core services of the public library Library 9.0, and the access point role that’s grown during past decade could easily be Library 10.0. It didn’t take long for the entire US to go from Library 9.0 to Library 10.0.

Now, that gives a better sense of the head start libraries have on the web; we’re already in our double digits. Web’s only just now hitting 2.0, but it has a buzz that’s undeniable, and the key idea is not that Library 2.0 will assimilate all the 1.0 stalwarts, leaving only a smoking bun blowing desolately across a gleaming dystopia of pulsating middleware and pingbacks, but that the next iteration of Libraries will take our formidable history and integrate the techniques and technologies of the Web 2.0 toolset to make something new, yet familiar, and hopefully, better.

Library 2.0 is not only for rich libraries.

It’s certainly true that at larger, more comfortably-resourced libraries and consortia, staff are more likely to have time to argue about this kind of thing, and while larger libraries are more likely to integrate Web 2.0 technologies into their services, the empowering thing about the tools is that it does not have to be that way. Because Web 2.0 is the product of increasingly smarter software development tools and progressively more robust open-source code libraries, inventing and implementing a new Library 2.0-style service requires more creativity than it does cash. Furthermore, the ideas of Web 2.0 are based around sharing code, access, and services; the stuff that the bigger libraries do over the next few years are likely to become available to smaller libraries much faster than the internet achieved its current ubiquity. The toe’s already in the door; better web-based services and the instant community they can bring can spread quite quickly, as the investments are centralized and little (if any) last-mile infrastructure upgrades are required.

Also, while a big focus of Web and Library 2.0 is on the web user, don’t forget that Library staff are web users too. Even if the digital divide still takes a bite out of the impact of a library web service in a community, these tools will provide better service and stronger community for staff and patrons in the library, not just remote users. And, as noted above, when these services get integrated into products, turned into packages, and distilled into simple scripts, implementing them is not necessarily going to involve a cut to collection budgets, especially if the services are provided for all libraries by Consortia or State Libraries. We’re all in this together, and the adoption curve is always speeding up… but it gets to everyone eventually.

Note: I do not hate books. I like books. I doubt that even the high school kid I saw on the bus wearing an ‘I Hate Books’ tshirt really hates books, even though he was listening to an iPod and texting at the same time, which probably doesn’t put him on the Reader’s Digest mailing list. However, there he was, the face of the future, and he thought that a good way to express himself, and possibly attract the attention of his preferred sex, would be to wear a t-shirt that declares his intense dislike of hard copy.

The real question about this guy is, where is he on the curve? If he’s an outlier, libraries should be ok for a while, yet. If he represents the mainstream, things could get ugly fast.

I wanted to see if this shirt was available online anywhere, in hopes of seeing what other shirts were being sold alongside it. For example, finding a shirt that reads “Does it look like I care” would confirm the ‘outlier’ theory, while finding it alongside a shirt that reads “Proust is a Yenta” could be one dead canary of a discovery.

I didn’t find the shirt (although I did find a cell phone wallpaper), but I did find 14,000 hits for “I hate books”. To put this in context, I searched for “I hate tuna” and “I hate pickles”, two phrases which ought to spill out of Google’s index like so many grain-fattened tribbles, and found, to my dismay, that books are hated an order of magnitude more than tuna or pickles.