I keep going back to the Lankes, Silverstein, and Nicholson article in the December issue of ITAL.* They did a really nice job of creating a theoretical framework to support the use of social networking technologies in libraries. It’s consistent with some of the work I do with students in research methodology courses as we talk about the social construction of knowledge and it reminds me of conversations with those who study narrative theories. I’ve been wondering, though, how one might measure the conversations.

If one assumes that facilitating conversations is part of the work of the library, how do we measure our effectiveness? Number of conversations? Decibel level? Circulation? Web logs? And what of the quality of conversation? Would the quality be seen in written and oral work submitted in classes?

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* R. David Lankes, Joanne Silversteign, and Scott Nicholson, “Partiicipatory Networks: The Library As Conversation,” Information Technology and Libraries 26, no. 4 (December 2007): 17-33.

I’ve been thinking more about the importance of conversations in the library. For a number of years I’ve talked about our collection embodying a conversation that spans centuries and continents, but it’s been harder to think about how to facilitate an ongoing conversation with our current library users. Certainly we do so by way of reference transactions but those seem fewer than I would like.

One of the pedagogical premises behind the direction we are headed in the Theology Library is that “knowledge is created through conversation.” We are trying to find ways to facilitate an ongoing conversation among our library users. I’ve been interested in how we might imagine the online catalog facilitating conversation. A couple months ago I embedded a Scriblio interface to a small collection of digital objects into the History of Missiology Web site. The idea is that we can allow users to comment on the texts. I decided to give it a try on a little larger basis. I’ve begun loading records from our online catalog into another instance of scriblio. This may be a way of providing a forum for conversation…

http://comm745-server.bu.edu/alt_cat/

After the MIT Communications Forum on “gaming and civic engagement” a few weeks ago, I mused about the possibility of viewing the library as a game. Ian Bogost commented that one of the things he finds most fascinating about games is that they force the player to live in a world whose rules are constructed by someone else (see my previous posts). Librarians construct the rules (policies, procedures, physical arrangement of materials and furnishing, subject headings, indexing, etc.) and require players (those who use our libraries) to function within the world we construct to obtain the information they seek to complete their tasks. I still find this an interesting way to look at the Library. The recent University of Rochester Undergraduate Research Project suggested that students may already be interacting with the Library like a game.

Nancy Fried Foster observed about the trend toward a self-service model that we see in most young adults:

It is tempting to relate this trend to lack of time, but I think it resembles a pattern of information seeking that is evident in students’ recreational activities—gaming, for example—when time is not an issue. Video and computer games come with little by way of directions. Manuals are available but not all gamers want or use them. When a gamer gets stuck in a game, s/he commonly runs through a variety of information-seeking activities, starting with experimentation with the game itself (Gee 2003). If this fails, the gamer may seek an online site for the particular game to see whether there are any “tips” or “tricks” that solve the problem. The point is that the parsimony of the gamers’ information seeking is not related to time pressure. It is related to a view of life in which instrumentality trumps relationship.

So self-service is the preeminent model and strategy of the information-seeking student. But when the student cannot satisfy his/her own needs and turns to real-life service providers, what happens? In their drawings of ideal library spaces, students sometimes group librarians with technical support staff and baristas at service desks (see Chapter 4). When they do not differentiate between different kinds of service providers, it is in part because they do not know the service providers, having experienced few person-to-person service relationships. If they have a need, they want it filled. If they want a need filled, they want to go to a font of all sorts of service, a sort of universal service point, a physical Google. In other words, they want Mommy.
….
But “Mommy” is not the same as a real student’s real mother, a person with whom s/he has a complex and ever-changing, ever maturing relationship. When I speak of the Mommy Model of Service, I refer to a Mommy who is the provider of everything to the infant. (p75-76)

If we were to imagine making the Library more game-like, perhaps we might:

1. Make the Library’s Web site a place to go for Tips and Tricks to be used when the player gets stuck.
2. Think about creating different “levels” in the Library that can be entered when one has found the right tool or accumulated the right number of points to proceed.
3. Ensure that guides and wisdom figures (avatar-like or not) become visible to the players periodically, giving the player the visual queues necessary to them identify them as safe to approach.
4. Provide an easy way to “save the game.”
5. Develop and support remote, virtual and on-site playing areas.
6. Develop and support multi-user as well as single-user playing modes.
7. Develop and support interactive interfaces for players who play the Library remotely, virtually, as well as physically in the Library.

Foster, Nancy Fried, and Susan Gibbons. 2007. Studying students the Undergraduate Research Project at the University of Rochester. Chicago: Association of College and Research Libraries. http://www.acrl.org/ala/acrl/acrlpubs/downloadables/Foster-Gibbons_cmpd.pdf.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the social construction of knowledge. We just completed a unit focusing on that in the class I teach, but I’ve been playing with the notion for several years. Ian Bogost said today at that MIT Communications Forum that living in a world you don’t construct forces one to view the world from a different perspective. He was, of course, speaking of the experience of playing a video game. It struck me that socially constructed knowledge or reality is a really hard concept to teach. We’ve all constructed our own and it is so essential to our being that we aren’t aware of it. But being in a video game, we live in a world constructed by someone else. I wonder if using a game might be a more effective way to teach that unit.

The theme for the conversation was “games and civic engagement: can computer games be tools for democracy?” This is the second or third conference focusing on game theory that I’ve attended. Each time I leave very aware of how illiterate I am in this medium. Each time I leave wondering how this might impact the Theology Library. Should I be adding video games to the collection?  Certainly there are some good games available that would be appropriate to the collection.

Or, at some level, might I think of the Library as a game. If it is a socially constructed reality of our (librarians) making, then inviting students to enter the Library as a game might be an interesting way to frame the experience.

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