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Hey Librarians: Less Book Clubs, More LAN Parties

THURSDAY JUNE 28 2007 9:00 PM

Submitted by _DictionaryGirl_. Edited By erin_broadley.

TAGS: librarians, LAN parties, ALA, abject horror

Youth culture is a curious and fleeting thing--one day you're totally hep and the cat's pajamas, and then suddenly before you even know it you're entirely out-of-touch, utterly alone and unable to impress subordinates with your archaic talk of rolling for initiative and the Dewey decimal system. Then you become a librarian.

The chairs of the American Library Association, however, aim to beat the odds. No longer content to go on as living monuments to the art of anachronism, they handed out new marching orders to their troops in the college library fields during their annual conference this past week, and the only command on the page reads: play more video games. STAT.

At a packed session for academic librarians attending the annual meeting of the American Library Association, in Washington, the topic was how to help students who have learned many of their information gathering and analysis skills from video games apply that knowledge in the library. Speakers said that gaming skills are in many ways representative of a broader cultural divide between today�s college students and the librarians who hope to teach them.

The problem facing libraries today, it would seem, is the divergence between what speakers at the conference referred to as "digital natives" and "digital immigrants." Much like an eager and hard-working newcomer at Ellis Island, so too are our poor librarians, trying to explain the ROGER system to a bunch of college freshmen with their crazy moon language, all LOLs and zerg rushes and the like. But would we have the whole of New York City learn Armenian to better communicate with our immigrant friend? Of course not, that's all topsy-turvy! So, too, must the librarians learn the language of the students rather than the other way around.

�The librarian as information priest is as dead as Elvis,� Needham [vice president for member services of the Online Computer Library Center] said. The whole �gestalt� of the academic library has been set up like a church, he said, with various parts of a reading room acting like �the stations of the cross,� all leading up to the �altar of the reference desk,� where �you make supplication and if you are found worthy, you will be helped.�

[...] James Paul Gee, a linguist who is the Tashia Morgridge Professor of Reading at the University of Wisconsin at Madison and the author of Why Video Games Are Good for Your Soul, argued that librarians need to adapt their techniques to digital natives. A digital native would never read an instruction manual with a new game before simply trying the game out, Gee said. Similarly, students shouldn�t be expected to read long explanations of tools they may use before they start experimenting with them.

�We should never read before we play,� Gee said.

Of course not. Heaven forfend we should read in order to learn. Especially at a library.

Gee and Needham have a whole lot of really super-fun ideas on how to better the library experience, using lots of fun terminology like "lowered consequences of failure" and "in-demand training." For example, rather than teaching a student how to use library equipment before they start, it has been decided that the best course of action is to let them aimlessly screw around on "explore" the equipment like it was Final Fantasy and they hadn't found any walkthroughs yet. When they finally ask for help, the librarians shouldn't make it explicit that they are formally training the students, but should instead opt to cheekily whisper "let me show you a shortcut," because shortcuts are cool, whereas knowing how to properly use a microfiche machine is totally lame and boring.

Here are some other totally boss ideas they have to improve the vitality of our library system.

Avoid implying to students that there is a single, correct way of doing things.
Offer online services not just through e-mail, but through instant messaging and text messaging, which many students prefer.
Hold LAN parties, after hours, in libraries. (These are parties where many people bring their computers to play computer games, especially those involving teams, together.)
Schedule support services on a 24/7/365 basis, not the hours currently in use at many college libraries, which were �set in 1963.�
Remember that students are much less sensitive about privacy issues than earlier generations were and are much more likely to share passwords or access to databases.
Look for ways to involve digital natives in designing library services and even providing them. �Expertise is more important than credentials,� he said, even credentials such as library science degrees.

What do you think? Way cool, n'est �e pas? Why construct intelligent, thoughtful e-mails when you can shoot the breeze with your librarian text-message style? Why rely on that nice person with the master's degree in library science to give you credible and pertinent information for that report on medieval warfare when your 16-year-old brother (level 62 orc hunter) is apparently just as qualified? Why... okay, you know what, I can't even find anything funny to say about hosting LAN parties at the library. I've got nothing. Just, why.

And then, the piece de resistance. Needham stressed in his lecture that no one is encouraging libraries to rip out the stacks in favor of arcades, but this kind of says it all.

Play more video games.

Onward, soldiers, toward a brighter and more intelligent future for tomorrow's youth. Let's not everybody rush all at once.

Thanks for the tip, Erin!

34 Comments

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magpieboy

Seattle, WA

June 2004

JUN 29, 2007 05:07 PM

kek

_DictionaryGirl_

NEWSWIRE

San Diego, CA

JUN 29, 2007 05:42 PM

LadyStardust said:

Ooookay, then. I'm young. I'm pretty in-touch with youth culture. And guess what? I'm a librarian!

And you know who else are librarians? Comic book geeks, zinesters, bleeding-heart liberals, tattooed weirdos (like me!), bloggers, gamers, and all sorts of other free-thinking, creative, (r)evolutionary people.

And you know what we've discovered?? A vast new truth: Libraries are not about books!

Amazing, but true! Libraries are about education AND entertainment. Libraries are about intellectual freedom and skill enhancement. Libraries are about life-long learning.

Does that mean books? Sure, of course it does! But it ALSO means *GASP* video games, and audiobooks, and DDR competitions where kids can dance off against librarians, and DVDS, and CDs, and MP3s, and magazines, and graphic novels, and even zines!

But you know what? Most of the digital natives out there, and apparently, the author of this article as well, seem to think that libraries are about books alone, and that librarians are all ancient, forbidding crones who can't tell HTML from HP Lovecraft.

Next time you want to write an article like this, Dictionary Girl, try doing a little bit of old-fashioned research and looking into all the new initiatives going on in the library world. You might be surprised by just how "hep" and "the cat's pajamas" many librarians really are.

Woahhhh there.

Maybe my sarcasm meter was running a little off; I don't know, I'm no FearTheReaper. But I would just like to go on record as saying that I was kidding in that passage you quoted. One of the whole points of my article was that blatant attempts to "be hip with the kids" are annoying to me because they are born under the assumption that, for example, librarians have no current means to connect with those they are trying to help. Perhaps that's true of some people, but obviously it's a pretty broad generalization, and I have friends who work at the library who are definitely not out-of-touch grandmas but can still probably be effective at their jobs without making everything into a video game analogy.

That's all. Sorry if it came across wrong.

_DictionaryGirl_

NEWSWIRE

San Diego, CA

JUN 29, 2007 05:48 PM

Short said:
I'm sorry, but what is the problem with this?

Video games get otherwise un-interested kids to read enormous amounts of text. They get kids to work on their math. Problem solving. Critical thinking. Hand-eye coordination.

Do they do these things better than some kid sitting around watching TV? Absolutely.

Hosting LAN parties creates a community, gets kids in a safe environment after hours, and gets kids who might not ordinarily into a library into one. Maybe they won't actually read any books, but maybe they will. And, if they were ever thinking about it, well hell, at least they'll be in the right place.

I don't give a crap if librarians want to tell kids that the dewy-decimal system is a NSA secret and they could be deported for learning it. If it makes them want to learn, then it worked. Besides, they'll figure out they were getting bullshitted pretty quick.

Most of the people that I know, who know computers, or video games, or cooking, or pretty much anything practical are good with (whatever) because they figured it out. They got in there, figured out what they could, and then got some books or somebody smarter then they were to help them. Its called "learning", and it should be encouraged no matter what form it takes.

edited for spelling.

I really do think you have a lot of good ideas and applications here, that would be really cool if we were talking about public libraries. Especially the safe-environment-after-hours LAN parties. The problem here is that what the ALA was focusing on are college libraries. You would think that it would not be so much college librarians' problem to get uninterested freshmen into reading, or keep them in a safe environment after hours?

Though a LAN party might be better than a frat party.

LadyMaze

I'm lost

July 2004

JUN 29, 2007 06:19 PM

What you don't seem to be understanding, Dictionary Girl, is that it's not about "blatant attempts to be hip with the kids;" it's about demonstrating to the kids that libraries--and even librarians!-- are ALREADY hip! A lot of people don;t know that we are, you know. We have a ridiculously strong, pervasive stereotype to fight against...the librarian as bun-wearing, bespectacled, tweed-skirted, pearl-wearing, 60-something frigid spinster, and the library as dusty, dead-silent, dull-as-dirt temple of dead knowledge. Anything and everything we can do to get people through the freaking door is something we should at least consider! My original points still stand here. Some librarians are young and hip, and libraries are not dusty book vaults!

And YES, all of these initiatives still apply to academic libraries! I've known FAR too many undergrads who've never stepped foot inside the library unless they got caught in the rain or got lost...and why? They think they can just use Google for everything...and anytime they have to use a book, they're much more likely to go to B&N or Borders first...and all because of the negative stereotypes that swirl around the library.

Again, it's not about "getting uninterested freshman into reading," it's about getting those freshman into THE LIBRARY itself, by making the library a fun and interesting place to be...that oh by the way, is also useful.

I still think that before you go around heaping sarcasm upon initiatives put forth by an organization that only has good works in mind, you should do a little bit of research and try to understand just why it is that the organization feels the need to even put together such an initiative, and understand all the factors at play. Criticizing librarians en masse for trying to help people... just because you've decided you disapprove of the way they're going about doing so...is just not cool.

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