ALA To Study Educational Impact of Gaming

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Raya Kuzyk -- Library Journal, 07/08/2008

•ALA and Verizon Foundation announce joint gaming-in-libraries initiative
•12 “gaming experts” from mostly public libraries to share best practices
•Project to culminate in "Librarians' Guide to Gaming"

At the opening session of the American Library Association (ALA) Annual Conference in Anaheim, CA, on June 28, ALA President Loriene Roy announced that ALA would use a $1 million grant from the Verizon Foundation, which also sponsored the conference’s first-ever gaming pavilion, to study the impact of gaming on literacy skills. Roy said ALA would be working with “gaming experts” from 12 libraries, most of them public libraries, to track the use of gaming as an educational tool and monitor the results of gaming initiatives.

(Check the LJ 2008 ALA Annual Conference page for more ALA-related coverage.)

These libraries are: Ann Arbor District Library, MI • Public Library of Charlotte–Mecklenburg County, NC • Columbus Metropolitan Library, OH • Georgetown County Library, SC • Minneapolis Public Library, MN • Old Bridge Public Library, Fords, NJ • Pima County Public Library, Tucson, AZ • Reidland High School Library, Paducah, KY • School Library System of Genesee Valley BOCES, Le Roy, NY • The New York Public Library • Todd Wehr Library, De Pere, WI • University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, IL

The ultimate goal of the project is to build a “Librarians’ Guide to Gaming,” an online literacy and gaming toolbox intended to serve as a national model for gaming in libraries. In addition to gaming’s potential to improve problem-solving and literacy skills, the study will also focus on gaming as a means to “attract library users of all types,” Roy said. As ALA Internet Development Specialist Jenny Levine has noted [corrected 7/9/08], librarian respondents to Scott Nicholson's (Syracuse Univ.) 2007 survey on the role of gaming in libraries reported that some 75 percent of patrons who attended gaming programs at their libraries returned for nongame–related library services.