Science Librarian at Penn State

If you are someone who feels guilty about playing Guitar Hero at ALA Conventions, then you may also wonder what role video games could have in an academic library. In many cases, as in most public libraries, the goal is to get students into the library with programming involving video games. But from the latest State of the Libraries by our Dean, we have plenty of students using the library so that isn't a high priority goal.

But what about a study break? Something to reduce stress during finals and other study time the students are spending in the library. Three separate articles from the Collegian Magazine today all evoked the need for this.

About winter break "[I'm] taking a well deserved rest from ... all-nighters in the library"

The entire article Students' study habits go beyond coffee craze about studying in the library

And finally Study: Americans shying from books (with a precious quote from our own Steven Herb) about the lack of reading for pleasure.

All of these cried out to me that students see the library as a place of stress, an almost necessary evil of studying. We have a responsibility to help students find a way to manage their stress and a video game study break could be a great start.

I am here at ALA in Philly. I am testing the Sony VAIO UX280P for PSU Libraries handheld device project. I am getting better at typing, but these posts will probably look more like Twitter each day. But web browsing is fast with the stylus AND built-in mouse. I can even take a picture of myself.

I attended one talk during the 2008 IST Graduate Symposium this year and it was the opening keynote from Google's Dr. Peter Norvig, director of research. I was hoping to hear more about the new Google Research project that would support eScience and large data sets. Instead I got a talk that appealed to the Computer Scientist in my (ah, 211). He covered what was in the description of the keynote, the amazing ability of simple algorithms to identify images and natural language text... just because of BILLIONS of data points. Test their ability to draw semantic links between ideas from words with Google Sets.

Some gems of insight:
"Don't make algorithms that work well, make algorithms that work well with large enough data"
We can model the entire world by "using the world as it's own model"
We don't need to define rules because "the rules are in the data"

1) Does anyone read my blog?

2) Do you know of any universities that have tenure track librarians and also a library school with tenured faculty? How similar are they and how do they interact? Those I have talked to so far (including myself) only have experience where the librarians are quasi-tenure with a separate/dis-similar system. How would Penn State accommodate Library and Information Science faculty professors?

We have a good number of books on Computer and Video Games from design to programming to marketing. But there are all over the place, and I don't just me at the College Campus libraries though their collections often hold more copies than University Park.

GV1469.17 3rd Floor Paterno - Business Library
QA76.76.C672 4th Floor Paterno - Life Sciences Library
Hammond Bldg - Engineering Library

I'll add more to this post as I find them, but if you want a really good example do a CAT search on keyword "nintendo".

This post is just to see if it shows up in Google Reader during Ellysa Cahoy's presentation on readers.

Also, Lawrence Lessig loves AMVs, which you can all watch now