The following is a conference report by Syracuse University Librarian Patrick Williams. Patrick received funding from CLRC via our Professional Development Award to attend a conference. Check out all of the details below! Patrick is also teaching a class on Zines at CLRC this week!
Thanks to a professional development grant from CLRC, I was able to attend a new conference for me, the Society for Cinema and Media Studies 2016 annual convention, and participate in a workshop on gaming collections in libraries and archives. Entitled “Gaming the Archive: The Challenges of Games Collections in Libraries, Archives, and Institutions,” the workshop featured myself, Chris Hanson from the Syracuse University English Department, Jennifer deWinter from Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Judd Ruggill from Arizona State University, and Ken S. McAllister from University of Arizona. We invited games scholars and game fans in attendance at the conference to discuss the challenges gaming and games collections present for researchers, librarians, and users. These users include not only those who research the games themselves, but media historians who use more traditional archival materials relating to the video game industry.
The goal of the workshop was to consider the following questions:
- How might these institutions adapt to starting, building, and maintaining collections of games?
- How do collections with game software and hardware in libraries and archives beyond campuses operate, such as those at museums or through initiatives designed for broader access?
- And how do collections either focused on games or those which include games as part of a broader archive of media technologies balance access with preservation efforts?
Despite the variety of backgrounds and institutions, participants in the workshop voiced a number of common concerns. Perhaps first among them was the perception that preservation of video games has not received the priority it deserves, due to both intellectual property concerns and the ways in which work in the field of game development is undertaken and documented. Participants were additionally interested in the ways in which games collections could be shared across institutions to ensure that researchers have access to both the documents and the actual games and systems they need. McAllister and Rugill co-direct the Learning Games Initiative Research Archive, an institution founded to do just that. Among the LGI’s widely circulating collections are over 12,000 games, more than 100 different gaming systems, and games related publications and artifacts produced all over the world. Their contributions to the workshop provided participants with ideas for managing small games-related collections at their home institutions, and focused on the legal, financial, and labor issues that processing, maintaining, and providing access to such collections entails.
As Jennifer DeWinter made clear in her contribution, many games archives and collections exist as a labor-of-love project for the individuals who maintain them, including many participants in the workshop. One thing that is clearly needed by the community is a shared infrastructure for managing and describing these collections, which can be as formal as being housed in a special collections like those at Stanford or as informal a transient set of plastic bins that follow a researcher from institution to institution.
Chris Hanson and I presented on the nascent gaming collections we are building at Syracuse University Libraries, alongside the opening of the Digital Development Lab, a multidisciplinary, collaborative space on campus envisioned to support gaming curricula, game play, and game development. Our contribution sought to provide counter examples to some of the perceptions that can be barriers to the development of games collections in libraries, including that games might not support the academic mission of the library, that they are difficult to procure and process, and that the costs are too high. In our experience, partnering directly with academic departments and working with campus IT helped us to address these concerns, and we offered workshop participants strategies for doing the same.
As a librarian, I always find it really interesting to see how ideas around collection, description, and access differ in the disciplines, and I came away from the SCMS conference with a much richer understanding of the ways libraries might embrace games (as well as other new technologies in media collections) to benefit researchers and students. Furthermore, it was great to get to meet and connect with other scholars in this broader conference context, as my own subject specialties overlap with film, television, and media studies.
