Are You As Smart As A Freshman?

I haven't been able to post much lately and have neglected some of the Librarian on Location duties so that I could organize and put on the second installment of Are You As Smart As A Freshman? Similar to the TV version - Are You Smarter Than A Fifth Grader?, our game has upperclassmen contestants competing for prizes with the help of Freshmen. It has been great fun and positive for the library.

If you have attended any library conferences in the past year you know that Gaming is certainly a buzzword among librarians. I have had trouble understanding the significance for libraries beyond the value of offering an up-to-date entertainment and information medium. Also, I haven't seen any real relevance with offering Gaming opportunities in the academic library setting except on a special event basis. But wouldn't Student Life do a better job with this than the library? So here is where our game comes in.

When we started this we had two goals in mine. 1) To offer information literacy in a fun and creative way. 2) To portray the library as a lively, up-beat, and exciting place. I believe we have accomplished the first goal by reaching more students who would have never come to our old Library workshops. After each answer in the game, a brief Did You Know? library resource fact related to the answer is displayed on the game screen and mentioned by the host (me). We also have fliers that list the Reference Desk contact information.

The second goal is my favorite one to try to meet. Is there a more stereotyped institution in our country than the library? Television has portrayed the library as either this exciting place to learn, read, and discover for kids(watch any PBS Kids show block and count how many times "library"is mentioned) or a hum drum, stuffy, bookish bore where only nerds hang out (the most common adult portrayal). Which portrayal do you think most college students identify with? Both probably and that is the problem. In their mind, libraries are for kids or for geeks but not for a young adult chasing a career, a date, and a social life.

The value I see in our game is the reality that something exciting, slightly edgy, and enjoyable can happen within the walls of the library. Hopefully this begins to crack the iron curtain of misconceptions about the library and tells students that to set foot in the library is not stepping foot into a boutique for only the literati, teacher's pets, and anti-social book rats. In some ways I think we have succeeded.