American Libraries

Monica Harris: This is our Mario Kart Tournament. It's single elimination; we’ve got 25 kids playing right now. We've been trying to become a real community center for Oak Park. And so we're trying to establish needs where people want them, rather than creating needs for them in a different way. So we thought we would take something that our kids were already doing, which is playing the Nintendo Wii—which is the most popular console probably in our area—and put it in a focused competition so that we were offering them something that they couldn’t have at home in a whole new way.

We also really have a reason to want to make sure that we are attending to the achievement gap in our community, which is a big issue here. And part of that is a technological gap as well. So this is really a way for them to get those technological skills that, as silly as it might seem, might really help them later in the future in education and also in the job market. We’ve also been able to establish getting new demographics into our library, which was also a goal for us. We wanted to continue to have programming that brought in totally new people, rather than just having the same programs that appeal to the same core group of users all the time. And we also thought we would try this on our teens because it's really important. But this is the kind of program that could work with a wide variety of age groups: it could work with our small children; it could work with our 20s and 30s; it could work with our seniors or our boomers. And so this is kind of a pilot program for us, but we're really hoping to expand this to all different age groups down the line.

This was kind of based on the Ann Arbor District Library's model that they had used. And we had seen how well it had worked for them and we thought we could see how really work off of that model. We also used the book Gamers…in the Library?! by Eli Neiburger in order to do a lot of our planning. He has a really great checklist of things to go through, including promotion and all of the equipment that you need. You don't have to have eight consoles in order to make this work—I want to make that abundantly clear. This can be a very expensive program, but can do it really inexpensively. When we were first trying to figure out if gaming was going to be a good thing for us, we started out by bringing our own consoles from home and letting kids play those to see how the reception was. One console is really not any more expensive than a story time speaker might be for a one-time event. And you're going to get so much use out of that.

We did a lot of staff preparation because we were worried about a positive/negative reaction, either from the press or from local people about this program. So we did what we called “Learn While You Learn” sessions for our staff. So our staff would come in from circulation departments on up to administration to come and learn the reasons behind why we were doing gaming, as well as exactly what it was going to be like. And they all got an opportunity to play the console. I think that really helped because then when people came and saw and said, “Why are you doing a gaming program?” everyone on our staff had the opportunity to say why this was important to our community.

The parent response I've been getting is really overwhelmingly positive. I'm getting responses from parents who have never had their kids be interested in coming to a library program besides this one. The kids also, of course, have been delighted and excited. And even the kids who never come—just for them see the poster and know that we're offering this, they see the library and think of it in this totally different way. So it's got that kind of far-reaching effect, even beyond the kids who are in this room.