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In: Academia, digitalhumanities, education, eliterature, games, innovation, materiality, play, presentations, Research & Projects, serendipity

University of Florida Event on October 4, 2011, 6pm: Jane McGonigal: Author and world-renowned gaming expert Jane McGonigal, PhD, is an expert on alternate reality games and a renowned game developer. She is the New York Times bestselling author of Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World. She has appeared at TED, the New Yorker, and the Web 2.0 summit, among others. Business Week has named her “one of the top 10 innovators to watch.” Watch Jane McGonigal on the Colbert Report. Text above from the Bob Graham Center for Public Service and available directly from theRead More →

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In: Library, play, UF

UF’s Libraries is a great work environment, as is the Digital Library Center in particular. We’re all friendly and fun, and this week we’re having a triple birthday celebration with three people having birthdays within the week. In light of our collective birthdays, and our hard work with nearly 1.5 million pages in the Digital Collections and more loading each day (and many audio and video files that can’t be counted in pages), these pictures are for us! There are more birthday-related pictures here.Read More →

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In: Collection Items, Digital Library, games, geocaching, objects, play

Augment or alternative reality games combine the digital and the physical to create innovative and interactive games. Notable examples could include geocaching games, and games where players decode information on websites to find information on other websites, call or email the “decrypted” phone numbers or email addresses, or any one of many other activities based on the information learned from the digital site. The real play of ARGs comes through in the back-and-forth from digital to non-digital and in the gaming communities these types of games create. While I’m familiar with ARGs from game studies, it seems like some library and archival materials almost invokeRead More →

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In: interface, museum, objects, play, video

Britain’s Queen Elizabeth is now on YouTube. Since there’s so much in terms of historical footage and in terms of history within that footage, I’m excited to see what this will mean for museums and historical materials. The Queen is on YouTube on The Royal Channel: The Official Channel of the British Monarchy. While many official organizations – political, governmental, and other – have released videos through museums and libraries, it’s interesting to see those materials being added into the regular-user interfaces where people can stumbled across them through the official-and-popular format. Seeing historical footage like “Roses for the Rose Queen” are interesting in themselvesRead More →

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In: Digital Library, games, Library, play

UF’s Libraries are testing different methods and uses of the library-buildings as third spaces (the not home and not work, where you go for social time and a break from the confines of home&work). This Thursday we’re testing Guitar Hero in Library West (third floor from 12-2pm). We’ve also set up a game section of our website for events like this and for game-like approaches to traditional library services. It’s fun for us to hone our skills and develop new ones through connecting games and the library, and games are an easy way to break traditional assumptions on what should and should not be inRead More →