If you build it ...?: One campus’ firsthand account of gamification in the academic library

Abstract

D ress up the way you would for an interview. Take a photo of a friend with a roving reference student assistant. What exactly is the VPN, anyway? Stop by the table to get the secret code.These simple tasks and questions are examples of the kinds of activities the University of California-Merced (UC-Merced) Library, along with several other affiliated groups encouraged participants to complete during our Welcome Week Campus Trek on the gaming app SCVNGR-an activity whose purpose was twofold: to introduce students to library and campus resources and to allow us to experiment with a new mobile gaming platform.We envisioned groups of students bent reverently over their smart phones, awaiting the next directive and learning while they socialized. We purchased prizes and booked rooms. We carved and sculpted challenge directions until they were lithe, 140-character maxims. We posted a LibGuide. Finally, we assigned student assistants to test out everything to ensure it ran smoothly.Then we waited for those groups of reverent, socializing students to materialize.And waited. UC-Merced wasn't the first of the UC campuses to experiment with SCVNGR. During the fall quarter of 2011, UC-San Diego (UCSD) launched their own trek that encompassed 15 challenges and required participants to roam all five of their libraries. 1 Students traveled at their leisure, learning about resources and trivia and earning points and knowledge along the way. After reading a report compiled by UCSD, the UC-Merced Library decided to

#selfiesinthestacks: Sharing the Library with Instagram

“…Librarians at UC-Merced and UC-San Diego designed orientation events with the mobile app SCVNGR. They created games that led students to different locations in the library where they responded to questions with text and pictures (McMunn-Tetangco, 2013). University of Alabama librarians designed an elaborate game that took place over the course of a month.…”

Advances in academic video game collections

“…UND Librarians customized this web-based trivia game, created at the University of North Carolina Greensboro, for their setting. Another example of an orientation activity concerned librarians at the University of California-Merced who developed a video game using the mobile app SCVNGR, a location-based game platform (McMunn-Tetangco, 2013). They used this game during a student orientation week to familiarize students with library resources.…”

Immersive information behaviour: using the documents of the future

“…Some examples may already be envisaged: immersive training, in medical and technical contexts; immersive educational products at a variety of levels of education; immersive access to heritage material; and immersive games and stories. The latter reminds us of one particularly disruptive effect of such documents, the blurring of the boundaries between leisure and information provision, an extension of the "gamification" of information provision and learning, whose benefits for library/information contexts have been noted (Prince, 2013;McMunn-Tetangco, 2013). It has been recognized for many years that the distinction between information and entertainment is artificial, and that there is in fact a continuum (Cermak, 1996;Case, 2012).…”