Comics and Game-Related Collection Development and Programming Resources for Librarians

A few resources to get you started....Remember to look back on our class notes slides on Moodle for links to other relevant sites.

Comics-Related

Mike Lavin at the University of Buffalo has a great starting point for information about comics. Here you can find resources to broaden your understanding of the history of comics as well as links to best-selling comics and reviews for librarians.

The Cooperative Children's Book Center at the University of Wisconsin also maintains a comics-related resource page that lists articles, links to review sites, and names titles useful for collection development.

If you're interested in more historically-focused information on comics, you can't beat the New York Public Library's Comic Books Research Guide.

Games-Related

Although it was included in the readings for gaming, Scott Nicholson's Games in Libraries links to useful information on all aspects of gaming.

It's brief, but this Library Journal blog post offers a good rationale for collecting and programming with games in libraries.

Check out this New York school library system's game library website for a rationale, ties to learning standards, and more.

--Carol

10 Technology Ideas Your Library Can Implement Next Week

From American Libraries, this article on easy technology tweaks offers up some good ideas for libraries of any size and flavor.

Do School Libraries Need Books?

As some of you may know, I'm not a GSLIS student. My current home department is the Computer Science department. I found this debate over at the New York Times on libraries interesting, and I would like to hear some of your comments on the topic. The debate concerns whether or not we still need physical books in libraries with, among other things, the increasing use of e-readers and the ever decreasing amount of books actually being checked out or browsed. I personally hate reading anything longer than a blog post on a screen and kill lots of trees printing things (I promise I print double-sided and with multiple sheets on each side of the page!), but I'm curious. What do some of you think?