The Librarian's Guide to Gaming:

An Online Toolkit for Building Gaming

HISTORY

TOOLS AND RESOURCES

BEST PRACTICES

CALENDAR

"The library highlights that gaming is a legitimate area of study in college and makes it possible for researchers at UIUC to have access to resources they need to write on this topic."

~parent

Gaming Initiative

University of Illinois @Urbana-Champaign Library, IL

UIUC Library is one of the largest research libraries in the world, the sixth largest collection in the Association of Research Libraries. The University Library has about 40 units distributed in more than 20 campus buildings. UIUC serves 30,000 undergraduates, 10,000 graduate students and professionals.

The University of Illinois Library's “Gaming Initiative” supports innovative teaching and research partnerships within the academic community and between campus and the gaming industry. The goals of the initiative are to support instructional use of gaming as a primary source material and to meet student needs for gaming materials. The collection goals include creating an archive of vintage and contemporary games; collecting secondary and supplementary research materials to facilitate the study of gaming; and investigating ways to capture the output of campus gaming initiatives, such as games created by UIUC faculty and corresponding research.

To convince trustees/board, university administrators, faculty and staff and patrons that the library should pull together a gaming initiative, the then Associate University Librarian for Collections, Karen Schmidt, charged a group with the task, which is now led by David Ward. There was top-level leadership from the start. It is now one of the Library's Strategic Initiatives, featured in their planning document. Pieces of the program include a research collection, gaming in the classroom, and academically-themed gaming nights.

Creating the Research Collection

The unique library contribution is providing a research collection of both the games themselves and complementary scholarly literature on gaming, with a related research project in library school: Preserving Creative America: Preserving Virtual Worlds.

The library's collection includes vintage consoles and games for classroom use, contemporary consoles for student use, subscriptions to periodicals such as Electronic Gaming Monthly (which ceased publication in January 2009) and Journal of Game Development, and books about gaming.

Marketing

Marketing for the gaming collection is accomplished through the UIUC Gaming Initiative website, the campus gaming research listserv, through relationships built with student gaming organizations, through Facebook publicity and the library blog, and through flyers in the library and residence halls.

Literacy Connections

Much of the material collected by the library is print-based.The collection supports curricular instruction, including assignments that focus on deep critiques of gaming structures and methodology to understand discipline specific themes and topics. These curricular applications help develop students' critical thinking and information evaluation skills.

Impact

UIUC is training graduate students to expect games in libraries, and influencing teachers to integrating gaming into curriculum.

Funding

The Undergraduate Library uses monograph funds to purchase the games, with an approximate budget of $4-$5K per year. The library uses gift funds and donations to acquire consoles, with about $2000 spent on current generation and vintage consoles. The Undergraduate Library is in the process of upgrading teaching facilities to allow instructors use of gaming consoles in classes.