 Good morning and welcome to this week's edition of Encompass Live. I am Krista Burns, your host here at the Nebraska Library Commission. Encompass Live is the Library Commission's weekly online event where we cover commission activities and anything that may be of interest to Nebraska librarians. We have commission staff that do presentations and we bring guest speakers. So everyone is standing at 10 a.m. central time. They are free and are recorded as we're recording this one. So if you want to listen to the review one and the review two, you can. Today is an online tech talk with Michael Sowers, Technology Innovation Library here at the Nebraska Library Commission. And Michael brings in guest speakers and does some talking about various techs in the last month or so. So I'm going to actually hand it over to you to take over and do your thing. All right. Sounds good. Thanks, Krista. As mentioned, for those of you who haven't met me before, I'm the Technology Innovation Librarian here at the commission, which basically means if it has to do with technology, I'm the one you generally call or I find out about things and whatnot. And gaming is one of the areas that Krista are into. We're both gamers ourselves, but in slightly different ways. You're more of the online wow sort of gamer. I do do that. And video games. But I do have console games as well. Yes, and well, and you know, I have an Atari 2600. Yeah, I have that. So, you know, if it's got more than one stick and a button, I get confused. But I like my card games and my board games and things like that. So I'm definitely a gamer there and have games on my phone, bubble burst or something like that. So anyways, what we've got today for you is we've got JP Pacaro. I'm going to attempt to unmute him. JP, are you there? Yes. Hi, what's up guys. Thank you for having me. Oh, you're welcome. What I'm going to do here is I'm going to switch over and give you a presentation. JP is going to give us about a 20, 25 minute little talk here and then we'll open it up for Q&A. So if you have questions as we're going along, just go ahead and submit them into the Q&A area. And we'll read them back to JP. Or if you do have a microphone as we do here, you can just let us know in the question section. And we'll unmute you when you can ask your question or your phone. Yep. So what we're going to do here is we're going to make JP a presenter. Yes. Okay, and he should be getting the magic screen. Awesome. Just a second. All right. There we go. And JP, I don't know exactly the presentation you planned, but if you could start out by just telling us a little bit about yourself and 8-Bit Library and where you're coming from with all this. Oh, sure. Okay. Hi, guys. I'm JP Percaro. I am a librarian at New Jersey City University, which is in Jersey City, which is the home to the Statue of Liberty. I also run a website called 8-BitLibrary.com, where one of the highest-trafficked library blogs on the web. And we generally talk a lot about gaming. And here we go. My internet is so slow. Oh, boy. Well, I could show you that later. Anyway, I've been going on kind of a speaking thing, trying to get the word out. What me and Justin who runs the website with me, what we're trying to do is get libraries to start building video game collections. And a lot of libraries, that's a very new thing, a very kind of new idea. A lot of libraries have been having games for a while, so it depends. But one issue that we always face before we can even start building a collection of video games to loan out or to use for programs is, like, why should we have it there? And so I've got this little slide here, some good reasons. Whoops. And of course I can't click it. Okay. Step one, gaming is a storytelling media. This doesn't matter what type of game you're playing. It's telling some kind of story. Even a game like Tetris is telling a story in a certain way, whether it be through the images or the sounds, the mix of it. And then there's games that have a lot of character development or plots, narrative devices. All of the words that we use to describe great books or great stories are words that you could describe video games with. And along those lines, gaming is a literate media, which means that you do need to know how to read to play it, right? There's a lot of ideas that you need to understand. You can't just pick it up and go. And along those lines, gaming is a media. And what I mean by that is a media is something that humans use to convey ideas, that we convey communication to other people, right? And video games is one of those ways that we do that. Books are one of those ways. Music, right? You can think of all different types of media. Video game is one of those types of media. And a library, one of the main roles that a library has always played in its community is the fact that it is a collection of media. So that's something that libraries do. And now this is a new form of media. And once we've got that idea that, okay, a video game does maybe belong here, we've got to think about, okay, so what can we use video games for? Just like what are we using our books for? One of those things is it builds community. You run a video game program. You're going to get some new faces out to your library. You're going to get people playing with each other. You're going to get people who wouldn't necessarily have ever had a conversation having a conversation, right? And that goes along with this next thing I have. It reaches out to a new audience or an existing audience in your library. And when I write here, everybody games, what I mean by that is that pick some way that we classify humans, race, gender, socio-economic, age. It doesn't matter what you pick, everybody's gaming. So in the end, gaming is for all ages, and all libraries can be hopping on this boat. So let me go to the next one. So once we've gotten that down, where do you start? Well, that's the question that I get the most. Where do we start? I will make these slides public for you all later so you can go back to click this link. But on my website, we have a sort of already outdated. Well, it's not outdated. It's a $500 startup, and my internet's not loading too well. But it's a $500 startup, which will start you if you can raise $500 to get all of the equipment you need and a couple of games that you can start building that. Also, there's a lot of other great resources on the web right now that can help you build the game, you know, where to start. But before you even get there, there's some things that you have to apply to your collection that doesn't matter what collection you're building. It doesn't matter if it's video games or books or whatever collection it is we're building. These are the places that you really need to start. And, you know, starting small is a good way to begin because, you know, these are trying budgetary times. So let's start small. And knowing your audience, that's the key here. How can you find out what your audience needs? You know, that's up to you. How are you already connecting with your library users? That's the thing you can think about on an institutional level. However, you know, I have some suggestions. Someone, a friend of mine here in New Jersey, what he's done is he bought a few video games, right? And whenever someone would check one out, they would have a little slip. They would make them fill out a slip that said, what other video games would you want to check out? And then they've got an idea building of, you know, what games do they not have yet that they need. And again, since this can apply to any form of collection you have in your library, you can do that with books too. You can do that with DVDs. You can do that with any media that you have, that idea. So knowing your audience is important for a library. Not just for gaming, as well as having a plan. What I mean by having a plan is I've talked to librarians who said, well, we bought video games and it just didn't work, which I sort of don't believe because when I look at the numbers of libraries that are checking out video games, it's always enormous. But having a plan is important. And what I mean by plan is that you can't just buy the games and throw them on the shelf and just expect them to be checked out. And again, this applies to your book collection. This applies to anything we do in the library. We shouldn't exist in a vacuum. So having a plan for how we're going to get these things moving and how we're going to get the community involved is very important. And that's something you can solve on an institutional level. So let's talk about this starting small. You don't have to conquer the world in a day. You're not buying every video game for every console that's out right now. Okay, buy a couple that you feel the community will check out. Starting small, 10 to 20 games per system. And what I mean by system is, okay, so Krista is one of our hosts today and she plays World of Warcraft, which is on a PC. And what I mean by system is there's a thing called a console, which you've heard of a Wii or a PS3 or an Xbox 360. Those are the three current biggest video gaming consoles. So say, okay, we'll get 10 games for each of those three systems and we'll get some popular titles. Now you've got a 30 to 60 video game collection that will circulate and it's small, but it'll be very popular. And know your audience like we talked about before. Open Suggestions should be one of our key ideas in libraries moving forward. I'm not just talking about being open to suggestions for video games, but I mean for anything. As we try to stay relevant in today's economic times or just as the informational landscape is changing, being open to suggestions is important. When you're building a new collection, this will be especially important because they'll be helping you to build it. And right here it says having gaming programs to see what people want. That's just for books, we run book talks, et cetera, things like that. For video games, you don't necessarily run a video game talk, although you really could, I believe. But what you do is you run a program where people come in and play video games. And when I was a children's librarian before I was in academia, I was a children's librarian for five years. And those were some of our most well-attended and fun programs is just getting people together, making new friendships in the library. Okay, I was just checking that my audio was still working. And talk to people. This is, you know, all of these things apply to librarianship in general, not just to video games. But again, meet people in your community. Meet 30-something. Meet teenagers. Meet little kids. See what they're playing. See my friend Andy Woodworth, who is a contributor to my blog. He runs video game programs for senior citizens. So, you know, just talk to people. It doesn't matter who they are, what their gender, going back to what I said before, it doesn't matter their gender or their race or their socioeconomic standing or their age. You got to meet them. Talk to them. See what they want. And, you know, that will, again, especially be helpful to you as you're building a new collection. And having a plan is super important. A lot of libraries that I was not so happy with that I've come across don't really have a plan for where they're going as an organization. They just kind of believe that the library belongs here. And they, you know, they're not trying new things. They're not saying, they're not asking this question, where do we want to see this collection in a year? And that is one of the key questions that you should be asking yourself for your video game collection. Where do you want to see it go in a year? Do you want to just buy these 60 games and say, okay, now I have a video game collection. Do you want to continue to buy new game titles? Do you want to buy certain titles? It's going to be up to you. If you have a branch system in your library, you know, are you just buying it for one branch? Are you buying it for multiple branches? So you might have to be pulling in other librarians. Just going back to my last slide, actually, where it says talk to people. I don't even feel like it should be your library users. Talk to other librarians. Talk to your staff. See what they're playing. And then there are things that you need to solve on your institutional level, like checkout dates, fines, oops, sorry, lost items here. You know, that's been a big reason that I've found librarians who I've talked to who don't want to get into the loaning out video game scene is because they say, well, what if it's lost? What I say is that because so many people are gaming now, can we afford to not include this as part of what we are as libraries? To say that's something that's so important to our community, that people have been voting with their dollars even in hard economic times to purchase these games, to play these games, and to spend their valuable money and time in their lives to play them. Are we going to let some small issue like, oh, losing a couple of video games stop us from being in that part of people's lives? I really hope that the answer is no to that. But I understand that there's some situations where you might say no. So going back to where to start. I know $2,500 to $5,000 might sound small for some people, but for a lot of people it's going to sound really large. Annual budget aim for $20,000, that sounds like so much money because it is. But there's a couple of things to think about. Again, going back to what I said, we have to stay relevant in libraries. And video games are what people are doing now. At any given time, there's a couple of movies that are released that are based around video games every year. Just walk around your local mall and see how important video game merchandises to people. There's no one who you can talk to that doesn't have some type of video game story, including our host, Michael, who said, oh, well, I had an Atari. Yeah, everyone has a story like that to say that even if they're not playing now, they used to play or they are probably playing now. So just people saying that this is important in my life. Maybe your library should now reconsider some of the materials they're currently buying and say maybe we can fit these video games in. Maybe we'll stop buying a little bit of this and we can buy a little bit of that now. And even if you decide against buying video games, it's still really important for you to look over that budget and say, is this what's important to our users? See, we're purchasing all of these reference materials. Are they being used? Or are they being used more than these video games are being used? Or if you say I don't want video games in my library, at least going through your collection can help you really grow as a librarian and help your library grow in a new place that is important to your users. And the big problem right now with developing a collection is we don't have a review source. For books, you have library journal and school library journal and you have book lists and any number of review sources for books. Video games, it's a lot harder to find. Right now my website is, sorry about that, is a big source of reviews. However, we really don't have a huge number like you would get from a review source. Some places you can go for video game reviews right now are these websites, oneup.com is great. These four, Game Informer, Xbox, Nintendo Power and PlayStation, they're all magazines. And let's say you don't want to start with a video game collection. Let's start by ordering some magazines. Let's get all four of these magazines in your library. See if they circulate, get two copies each. See if they circulate. And when you see just how fast they circulate and how often they circulate, it might maybe change your mind a little bit more towards the fact that this is important for your library. And within the next year, we will hopefully be seeing video game reviews in a couple of the bigger library review sources. I've been behind the scenes with some people, hopefully, you know, to help this along. So this is just a review of what I said at the beginning, though, about why this video gaming is important. And, you know, media is how humans transmit ideas and information. And this is happening through video games. So I can turn off this and maybe we can chat a little bit with Michael. How do I turn? Actually, you know, you can actually stay right where you are if you want. In case anybody's got a question if you want to bring a slide back up or that. We were able to bring up 8bitlibrary.com on this end. So if it didn't come up for you, we'll be able to eventually show everybody. Oh, cool. And as usual, we will be providing with the recording all the slides, all the bookmarks, everything. So if you missed a URL, don't worry about it. We will make that available when we announce the recording later this week. Right. Chris, have any questions come in from the audience at this point? No, the only question I'd say is one person did just say $20,000 question mark. I think wondering about what would that be. I know you started out beginning saying that really you can even get started with just $500 for the basics, but what would $20,000 really entail? I think that might be the concern or question. What do you get for $20,000? Yeah, I mean it sounds like a lot, you know, because it is. You know, and it's difficult, but for $20,000 you can probably buy each of the new consoles, which run you a couple hundred a piece, and then you can just buy a larger number of titles after that. You know, the video games are about $50 to $60 a title. So, you know, that's two to three books, new books. So it is a considerably larger expense, but I think in the end you'll see a much better turnover as far as getting people in your doors. You know, there's only two ways that libraries can quantify success, and you know, our two quantifiable measures of success are circulation numbers and attendance numbers. And anyone who I've ever talked to who has had a successful video game collection not only is filling up rooms for programs, you know, standing room only for programs, but they're also circulating video games like crazy. You know, they might have, back when the Vinci Code was popular, you know, ten people on the waiting list for that, and thirty people on the waiting list for video games. So in libraries that I've seen is successful, it's very successful quantifiably. So that's why I would say a large dollar number would pay off in those important numbers to, you know, those of us who were, you know, justifying that budget too. Yeah, and if that is scary to some people, we've done some presentations here on gaming and where I sometimes purchase my own games. There's local stores sometimes in your towns where there's discounts. We have a place here in Lincoln called Gamers where people resell their games and you can buy them for cheaper than the original price. So there is a way to, like you said at the beginning, start out small by searching out those kind of places that are out there. Yeah, absolutely. And actually, I like that you said that because there is other problems, you know, with PC games. First of all, a lot of libraries are on that, you know, voucher system or, you know, an invoice where you order it first and then you pay the invoice and that's a little bit harder to find. Right, right. But when we, going back to that slide that I had talked about before, when we meet people in our community and we start talking, you know, that's a connection that would be really valuable to have. You know, connections not just with the video game sellers in town, but connections with all the businesses in town. You know, really this talk is, video games is just a catalyst for, you know, successful ideas in libraries and one of those really successful ideas in libraries is building a connection in the community. So if you can make a connection with a local business owner who happens to sell video games, not only will it help you, you know, hopefully save some money, but it will also be a valuable place for the library to get the word out and it will also be valuable for that business owner to know that people in the community are supporting him as well. You know, it's win-win. Yeah, Tonight's Game Night is sponsored by So-and-So Business in town. Yeah. Okay, so I'll let Krista chime in again if we get more questions. Yeah, Krista has no problem interrupting me, I know. But I just kind of made some notes and had some questions for you. I'll try to take them in somewhat of a logical order here. Go ahead. The big one that always comes up is, okay, you know, even if the whole library staff and the director are convinced or whatever, you run into the library board or maybe it is even the director or whatever where you hit that barrier that says games in the library ain't going to happen. Can you give us like one or two pieces of advice on how to deal with that sort of issue? Yeah, absolutely. There's a couple of things. Usually their argument there is not just about video games but about video game content to say, oh, well, video games don't belong in because of the content. So one reason that I would give is we have this big thing called Band Books Week in libraries. And what it is is about content in the books to say, you know, there's some people in the community that say, these books don't belong here. And I think in libraries what we really should be moving away from is censoring content. And then along your question, you know, a lot of librarians I found that have had that argument for me, they say, well, in a book you don't see this content but in a video game you do. And of course I always say, well, you know, in a movie you see it and you have that movie there. But also along those lines what we don't want to do is judge a media based on its content. You should, all media, let me rewind. Just because one book has bad content doesn't mean that we should ban all books. And that goes the same with video games. Even if you decide that content in some video games might not fit for your library, that doesn't mean that all video games should not fit in your library. And then as far as if there's still skepticism to say, well, this is very, you know, expensive or whatever, I would use those ideas. Hey, let's start small and let me show you with numbers how successful this is. And, you know, if the content argument doesn't work and the ban books argument doesn't work and they don't see these huge numbers which they will, you know, they're still kind of against it, that's just something I don't know. How else can we all deal with it? I guess that's an ongoing conversation we have to have in libraries. There's also the idea, and this is something that I've kind of kept an eye on, well, I keep an eye on about lots of things for gaming related, is colleges and universities having gaming courses and gaming programming. I'm not talking about how to become a programmer. I'm talking about using them in their coursework. I just saw an article yesterday about a PC game called Portal that you might know of J.P. They can't see our screen at the moment. I did bookmark that. A college is using this game as quote-unquote required reading in one of their courses and using it. Incoming freshmen, actually. Incoming freshmen is required class to consider it as a class of contemporary work, confront once we mean what we mean to be human and how we understand ourselves, our relationships, our world. They're using it in humanities class and it's part of the starting discussion with these students and they have to actually play the game and then come back and talk about it. And it's not just a gaming class. It's a general class. This is just one part of it. And there's many of those instances that you can find of colleges and universities using these things to complement other courses, history courses, literature courses, economics courses. I mean, it's out there. And get them learning about these games when they're younger and they'll already have that leg up when they get to college and the stuff's in their courses and college. Yeah. And, you know, along those lines, I actually wrote an article about Pokemon for school library journal, which was in the May issue if anyone wants to look it up. And all I did was talk about how we can use Pokemon in the classroom. And, you know, there's a big movement in the education system, just what we described, to use video games in curriculums, not just as a source of content, but also a way of assessment. Lots of really cool stuff. If you are really interested in what Krista said and what I'm talking about, look up a guy named James Paul G. He said, yes, and I do believe, did he come out to one of the old ALA gaming? I don't know if we've ever had him out at one of the gaming events for ALA, but he is the man as far as talking about video games in education. And that could definitely be another great advocacy tool, Krista. So thanks for that. And, you know, along those lines, I heard that like a hundred years from now, people might look at the original Super Mario Brothers on the same level that they look at like Dostoyevsky, some of his work, because of the level of storytelling and involvement. You know, because the book is very involving, right? It takes a lot out of you. So does the video game. You're very involved in it. And, you know, if it tells a good story, then we laugh at it now, but you wonder. You wonder. Yeah, I do. Someone wanted to ask about the name. It's James Paul G. And so it's James Paul. And his last name is G-E-E is how it's spelled. And we'll add his site to our bookmarks. Yeah, we've just got it here now. So that's the person that we're talking about. Can I actually say one more thing about James Paul G? Sure. He had a little thing on PBS. And what he talked about was how the educational landscape is changing. And what he means by that is in the past, to learn something, you have to go to school. That's how you learn something. Now in the digital age, when you can learn things in other places, school becomes less important. And what he called these other places was sort of competition for schools. And one of those things that he listed is libraries, because what libraries do really well is get you information on the map, the information that you need when you need it. And so as educational landscape changes, libraries are possibly going to play a more important role than they used to be. Which is something that I learned from James Paul G. He's not a librarian, so that's very cool of him. I do have a comment on our questions here. This person says more of a comment than a question, but Steam is an online place where you can download games and whatnot, which portal is from? That's where I have it from. It offers the Source U program, S-O-U-R-C-E-U, where you can get access to 15 plus Steam games with private forms for very reasonable prices. And this person says they had planned on holding LAN tournaments, as well as teaching a few source SDK classes, just an idea people may want to check out. Steam is a great site to get games, and sometimes they have really good prices to download these. But that's a great idea. They have access to some private forms, so you could have something set up for the kids coming into your library, where they can all use that area to safely and privately communicate about the games they're playing. Yeah. And going along that communication line, what you just said, what's really important that a library can really get out of bringing video games into their library is just what you said. Having people communicating information to each other, you're helping to build connections in your community, and these connections are built around information. It's going to be built around these kids or these adults or whoever they are sharing information with each other. So what if it's a video game? Who cares what the information is? What's really important is that your library is now sort of this hub of information and communication. So that's really cool. I love that theme idea. But I mean, I think that would happen no matter what game we have in there. It's very cool though. True. You touched on the issue of content in video games, and I want to come back to that for a second. And it's been in my experience in most public libraries that they won't go near any sort of video game labeled anything above teen in the ratings. So no, you know, Grand Theft Auto or Halo or anything like that. And in conjunction with that, I tend to notice that video game collections are shelved in the teen area. And this is something I've noticed a lot with graphic novels also. And, you know, I'm an adult. I read graphic novels. I don't play as many video games. But, you know, I wouldn't necessarily stumble over them because I don't go to the teen area. Yeah. I mean, that's a problem, I guess. It's just a cliche thing that we have. I mean, the average video game buyer is older than I am. And so, you know, people of all ages are playing these games. It's just, you know, we can get over that together, I think. It's a stereotype I think we can get over together. Because along the lines, there was just that article last week in the New York Times that, or maybe two weeks ago, about how the majority of people reading, you know, YA literature are not YA aged. So I wonder if this is not just a conversation we're having about video games, but we're having it about, you know, all kinds of people stereotypically teen media, you know. But I would like to see these video game shelves all over the place. Or not with the teens, but it's fine. Sure. We can start somewhere. Right. I've seen many libraries doing programs now, adult gaming nights. Meaning just for the adults to come in to play the games. Because they know that the average gamer, the age of the average gamer, what, is now 35, 36, something like that. That's, you know, the studies, that's what they, that's what it's out there. So they're saying, why should we just have these for the teens? And there shouldn't just be in the teens section. They're just saying, here's the video game section, no matter who you are. I agree. You know, part of it, sorry, go ahead. Good. All you. Okay. Well, I think part of the problem, too, is that, well, I wouldn't call this a problem. But I think teen librarian is a new sort of idea in libraries. I mean, it is a new idea in libraries. It's like the new positions that have been created over the last 10 years. And so I think part of the reason maybe that the teen librarian or the teens are kind of getting this is just because they're looked at. Maybe it's kind of this fresh new librarian with the fresh ideas. But you know what? In my opinion, all librarians are really terrific. And any of us can be doing this. And I just think it might just be because maybe the administration thinks of them as the new kind of fresh idea. But we can all be doing this. We can all be doing this. Sure. Absolutely. And the other thing, the last kind of note I made to myself when we were talking about money, and this is where I just encourage more money be spent, is, and I'm sure JP will agree with me, is get the games, but then get the books that go with the games. Explain how to play it and the cheat codes and all that other stuff. Kind of do a one to one where if you're going to get the game, get the book that goes with it. The strategy guy. That's the word I was looking for. Yeah. Let me explain that a little bit. Video games come out. And a lot of times what will be published right alongside that video game is a pretty lengthy book that describes how to get through this game or secrets or whatever. You could almost think of that as a critique if you think of critiques of literature. And there's a couple reasons why it's a great idea to buy those. First of all, what it just proves to you or could prove to someone skeptical is that an information community exists around this game. And if a whole book can be published just about one game and a whole book could be published about every game, then that means that there is a lot of value outside of just game. And that would be that information community. But then second is that going back to what we said about quantifiable success, now you can be checking out a book and a video game. So now you've got two numbers there that you wouldn't have had in the past. And so if we're talking about quantifying success, that's a great way to do it. And along those lines, not only strategy guides but one thing that I'm big on advocating for is connecting collections. And what I mean by that is you can have someone loan out a video game about World War II and then you can loan out the strategy guide about it and then you can loan out some nonfiction about that time period or you can loan out some fiction or you can loan out similar games or you can loan out similar topics. So now instead of just loaning one video game, now we've loaned out not just the video game but the book strategizes the video game and some nonfiction books that are related. And so now we're not just becoming an entertainment center but we're adding value to our users' lives and in the end also looking pretty successful doing it. Yeah, and that made me think that chances are, especially in a public library in your genre fiction section, there's probably some novels already that you own that are based on video games. I mean there are World of Warcraft novels, there are Gears of War novels, you name it, there are more and more fiction being written based around video games also. And I mean if you can get them reading some of those then you can move them on to other sci-fi and then you can move them on to other fiction and now what you've just done is you've just done Reader's Advisory. It just so happens that not all of them were books. And there are games that were based on novels going the other direction, Lord of the Rings. Yes, it was a huge movie series, it was a series of books first. Some of our teenagers may not know that. And it's not an online game, Lord of the Rings Online. So you can say, you know that game, you know, it's a book, go read it. Yeah, and you know, I mean if anyone watched the Super Bowl this year, one of the biggest commercials was for Dante's Inferno, which was a book based off a pretty popular work of fiction, a video game I should say, a video game based off a book, I'm sorry for that, but that actually was a pretty good game from what I've heard. Okay, all right. JP, thank you very much. Is there anything else you want to kind of throw in and we're going to kind of wrap up this section and switch gears? Yeah, you know, they told, I've been told to stop plugging my website, so I'm not. But at this point, go to www.library.com. Yeah, actually, yeah, one more thing I wouldn't mind adding in, too, is just we're like running this retro game festival on September 11th in New Jersey. So if you're around Jersey at the time, come out. But I also think what's cool about that for any librarian just to hear is that I'm not just talking about these current video games, but almost preserving our heritage and preserving heritage is one of those big things libraries do. And, you know, gaming is an important part of some people's lives. Like Michael was talking about here, Atari 2600. Now, you know, we're going to be playing an Atari 2600 at the library in a couple of weeks. So, you know, that's another thing that we can also think about is, you know, how can we preserve gaming heritage at large? Yeah, and I think at our state conference this year, Chris and I are running the gaming night. And if everything goes well, the Atari will be running. Trouble is, they're not designed to be hooked up to today's projectors. So that's the fun part. That's true. You're right. Yeah. Oh boy. I didn't even think of that. I'm glad you said that. Something to check out. Yeah, we ran into that last year, and we need to figure that out before our conference in November. And I'm just going to throw in, looking at your banner there, that one of you guys, or both of you, are behind the whole Get A Tattoo in ALA. Oh yeah, that was love. So you're a librarian. Oh yes. Yes, that was awesome. It started as a joke on Twitter, and it kind of blew up. And at the last ALA, we had a bunch of librarians go as a group to get tattoos, like all the books and the reader thing, and it was cute. Yeah, I've seen people with having that ALA logo now as a tattoo and other things. That's an awesome idea. Do we have one more question coming up? Yeah. We just have a comment. Somebody contributing, Tiffany Keenan, who's a librarian from here in Nebraska Alliance Public Library. There are more and more video games being written by popular authors as well, like Tom Clancy and Clive Barker. So if you know people that like these certain writers already, you can turn them on to the games that they are involved with. Yeah, that's absolutely true. And actually going back to your question, how do we convince a skeptical library board or director or even a skeptical community, a video game with the word Tom Clancy in the title? I mean, how can that not fit in the library? Yeah. And for any Tom Clancy fans, I just found out he's got a new book coming out in December. It's been several years. I'm waiting. I'm impatiently. Well, JP, I want to thank you once again. That was a wonderful presentation, great conversation. And we appreciate you taking some time out of your day to do this for us. Yeah, very easy. Yeah, thank you so much, everyone. Thank you so much. You're welcome. I'm going to go ahead and take a presentation back from you. You're welcome to hang out for the rest of the show. That's not a problem. We encourage it. But if you do need to go, totally understand. Great. Thanks, guys. Yeah, you're welcome. Thank you, JP. All right. I'll talk to you all later. Bye-bye. All right. So we, as was mentioned, we pulled up some of the sites that we're talked about that are currently in the bookmark list for this session. We will be adding these. Steam is at steampowered.com. It's a great way to buy video games without going to a store and purchasing physical objects allows you to, I use Steam for a couple of games because once I purchased it through Steam, I can go to any other computer I own and get that game. And it carries through all of the different computers that I run. Portal is one of those few games that I really do like to play. I also got Plants vs. Zombies recently. And I got sucked into that. I haven't done it yet, but I need to. Yeah, it's a fun game. There is, in case you didn't catch how to spell his name, this is his website, jamespaulg.com. We will bookmark that, and you can take a look at that. There is the Legend of Zelda and Philosophy. There you go. How's that for a little retro there? And Apent Library, as you saw earlier, was able to come up. I think the site was running a little slow. It's a little bit, but now it's running fine. It seems to be working again well. So we had so many people going to his site all at once, I think. Yeah, it's just way too... It's our fault. I'll take credit for that one. Okay, so we got about 15 more minutes left in our hour here. I've got a relatively short list of bookmarks this month. I wanted to be sure to have plenty of opportunity for JP to give his talk. And the first one I will bring up, this one I did actually bookmark this morning. The Portal game, Wabash College, it's on their required reading list. So a video game is being described as required reading in this case. So I find that very, very interesting. And it's a game that makes you think. I am not going to try to explain it. If you look it up, take a look at it, and just keep in mind that the cake is alive. It's not just a game where you're trying to do something. It messes with your mind. And perception, and yeah, you really have to think about things. And this one also, you hear people talking about it, and the cake is alive thing, and stuff about what's really going on in this game. But there's also science in this physics, how you're supposed to negotiate through this game. It takes a lot of that kind of thinking too. It's not just a shoot, there's no shoot them up or anything in it actually. Yeah, well they're shooting, but you shoot portals into a wall. Yeah, but not like, but it's very, yeah. It will either be, it's a kind of three-dimensional puzzler too. And so it will either frustrate you instantly, or you'll love every minute of it. I'm kind of stuck in the middle there. Okay, so let me talk about some of the other bookmarks I found recently. Some of these get back to some things that have been asked of me lately. Maybe some previous sessions, things like that. And so the first thing I'm going to do is I'm just going to remind everybody. I mentioned this last month, I will be mentioning it again next month, I'm sure. Every month. Every month until conference, library camp in Nebraska, three. You don't have to live in Nebraska to attend, but chances are you do live in Nebraska if you're going to attend. It is one of the pre-conferences for State Conference this year. It will be on Wednesday, October 13th in Grand Island. You do not need to pay to attend library camp. It is free. And in fact, you can come just to library camp and not come to the rest of the conference if you really want to. But we'd love you to come to the whole conference too. Please, yes. It's not required. But registration is being handled, excuse me, through NLA. And all the instructions are on this website and also on the NLA conference website. So just something to look forward to. We invite everybody to attend that. Online converters. Some people have been asking me lately about services to convert different file formats from one to the other. I've got a WAVE file I wanted as an MP3. I've got a PDF and I wanted it as a Word document. I've got an ePub or a PDF and I want it to be an ePub eBook format, things like that. There are a lot of them out there. This one I just stumbled over earlier this month. And the really cool bit about this is it's got all these formats built into this one interface. I've got bookmarks for image converters. I've got bookmarks for PDF converters. I've got bookmarks for these other converters. This is one place you say, you know what? I've got a document and I want to turn it into a doc format. You choose that. You upload your file or you enter the URL of it. If it's online, you click convert file and depending on whether videos will take longer than documents, that sort of thing. But it will do the conversion for you and you can download the converted file. So this is kind of your handy-dandy tool of the month, I would think. If you've got anything. And you can go through and see all the different formats but literally dozens of conversion options available to you. Oh, we have a comment. Quite a comment. Question, yes. The website. This is David Bibb from the University of Great Falls Library. He says that Zamsar.com. Yep. Z-A-M-Z-A-R.com. We'll add that to our links. Also have a number of formats for audio, video, documents. Yep. I'm familiar with Zamsar. That's what I've used in the past. I don't know if any one of these is any better than any other. I mean, it usually either works or it fails. That Zamsar seems to be taking its time loading up. So we'll let that just kind of run in the background. But yes, we will add that to the bookmarks list. The next two, I'll throw these up here. Kids Tube and Teacher Tube. I'll actually just load Teacher Tube. These are alternatives to YouTube. But they are, and especially Teacher Tube, it's stuff that's already been looked at by adults and have said yes, these videos are all appropriate for use in education. They were really created specifically because a lot of schools block YouTube because there's all sorts of inappropriate content on YouTube. But there's some really good content on YouTube. So what the folks at Teacher Tube and Kidvid have done is they go through YouTube and they find the stuff that's really good for educational purposes and they make this available and then the school gets the IT department to say, well, okay, you're blocking YouTube, but please unblock Teacher Tube. And we know that anything on here the kids can watch and it's not going to be a problem. So even in public libraries, if kids looking for a video or something, you might want to direct them towards Teacher Tube or Kidvid. So they don't maybe stumble over the things that might get the parent upset about what are you showing my child in the library? Oh, is that it? Come up. There we go. And there we go. Also, yep. So upload. You sent me this one time when I was trying to do something. And so you can see there's image formats, doc formats. They might even have more formats than the other one. So there you go. And that's an ad. There we go. Sorry about that. Points for Zanzar for playing us a video ad. All right. And then just a few more. I kind of pulled some things this morning. I tend to go through and say, hey, what have I been looking at? This was just an announcement. This is not available to anybody or to everybody yet. So you may have this and not even know it. But Google is testing and there's a video you can watch that explains it in more detail. Testing search results as you type. So literally as you are typing in the search box, the search results just to what you're typing. So if you type, you know, A and B, it gives you A and B. But the moment you say and C, the results will change as you are typing. So you don't have to say, oh, well, I should have limited by another word. I'll type another word, hit search again. So in other words, it's searching as you type, not after you click search. Interesting. Yeah. So I'm just like, ooh, give me access to that. I want to play with it. And it turns out it's testing on a select number of users at the moment. So it's not something you can turn on, but you might want to keep an eye out for it. Sometimes they'll announce these things in like Google Labs and the experimental features. I can see that that would be very interesting to see how, just see dynamically how as you, when you're teaching, like in universities and colleges, teaching the first year students, here's how you run a search. Here's how you do it. We don't use the word bullying and what, and see how the search results change dynamically. You're adding other terms to it. And you can see, oh, that's what you mean by adding that or deleting that, not using that term because you see it change live. In library school, I was taught you write out all your searches in advance. And you plan. And then you do these two searches. And then you combine the previous searches. And none of the freshmen coming in who aren't library school students do that. Yes. They type in one term and take what comes up. Well, and that reminds me of a quote that librarians search patrons fight. You know, search is a very specific thing in a lot of people's minds. Okay. I'm going to mention Firefox. We're using Firefox here in the recording, as you can see. The latest betas of version 4.0 are now out. I think we're on the fourth beta. You can go to the mozilla.com site, find the beta version. It's got some interesting new features in it. I've played with it just a little bit. I've got to admit I've mostly moved to Chrome. I don't use Firefox as much as I used to. But they are starting to integrate some features. Crash protection on tabs. Some of the stuff Chrome has had for a little while. But especially if you're a web designer, you might want to check this out and test your websites against the next version coming out. But it's going to be nice. I think what little I have seen of it so far, I've been impressed with. A couple more here. This one is for a website. Super site for Windows by Paul Thorott. This is something I've noticed is a problem for me at home. And this might, I think, be useful to some of the folks who run the public PCs, possibly, especially for the staff. If you have automatic updating turned on, which maybe in a staff or public PC situation, you probably have turned off. But at home, you probably haven't turned on. And for some of us more techy people, I can remotely log into my computer at home. As long as it's booted up and I'm logged in. Well, the problem is that I go away for a couple of days and then updates run and then the computer reboots itself. The problem is I'm no longer logged in. So I can no longer remotely access my computer. Oh, that's awesome. Yeah, it kind of does. Especially when I'm gone for like a week and this happens on day two. So there is actually something you can do in the Windows registry to turn off the automatic rebooting. So updates will run and updates will install, but then you have to reboot. This may not be of use to everybody. I thought it was just a neat little trick. I've used it. I've not had the opportunity to actually need to use it yet. But actually I think some updates are coming soon. So we'll check that out next time around. So just kind of a little tip out there for those of you who might eat it. And I will talk about this one here. I write. I have a book project I'm working on right now. And sometimes I have to kind of force myself to get some writing done. So this is a web-based or download application called Write or Die. And you give it either a word count and or a time limit. And it will basically prevent you from doing anything else on your computer to breach that time limit and or a word count. And there are some very interesting features, especially in the desktop edition. You can make it so that the backspace doesn't work during that time. You can make it so that you can't save anything until you've met your goal. So in other words, you better write. You can make it so that the program is always in front. In other words, it becomes your word processor. So you can't switch to another program. You can't do anything else. And so just fun. So you can say, you know what? I need to write a thousand words in the next 45 minutes. You click Write and then until you've written those thousand words and or you've reached your 45 minutes, you can't do anything else with your computer. Okay. Chris is like, no, I don't think I want that. Luckily I don't write stuff like that anymore. I don't have to. I can say I feel a deadline to go to school. I know I was the world's greatest procrastinator in college. Yeah. This would have been probably very useful to me then. So and the last thing I'm going to show, I kind of debated this, but I think I'm going to do it. Some of you, this is for the Nebraska folks. Some of you may have heard of a project we've been working on here in Nebraska called Nebraska Libraries on the Web. This is free WordPress based hosted websites for right now public libraries. We have done three test groups so far. We are working right now to put together the next testing group for training this fall. Right now it is invite only, but if you are interested in kind of how it works, there is a wants to participate link in the upper right hand corner here. Our current plan is to, that's new as of yesterday. I thought so. Sorry, I didn't remember that from the last time I looked at this. And like I said, right now invite only, but the plan is early in 2011 we will actually kind of open this up to public libraries statewide and then see how it goes and possibly open it up to other libraries beyond that. Still some decisions to be made, some kinks to work out of the system, that sort of thing. But I just kind of wanted to be out there. We are getting those phone calls. We are getting those emails. When can I get in? When can I use this? We are working on it. The project is going really, really well. We just want to do a couple more things with a couple more test groups to kind of get all the details down. Kinks worked out of the system before we open it up to everybody. But you can keep an eye on what is going on with the project here. Superior Public Library just went live last week, last Thursday. I have got a couple more who fingers crossed will go live this week. They are thinking they are really close to being ready. So things are going quite well, I would say there. This is a really great project to see all these libraries, some very small public libraries who are finally having a web presence. Or they had one before and it was buried somewhere in the city's site. They have their own. They have a blog. They are posting things. It is really great to see these people being out there. I will even bring up Superior here just for fun. They are pulling it up. She said she really liked this image because it pretty much described Superior. There is nothing out there. There are some things out there. The town is out there. The town is there, yes. The larger area, not much else. Lots of open spaces. Yes, open spaces. That is wonderful. All right, do we have any other questions or comments? Anybody have any questions or comments? Type them into the questions if you want us to unmute you, we can. I see you guys have been just tossing them in here along, which is perfect. Yes, that is great. We are pretty much out of time. It is about our hour. I will just throw in. Actually I think I have the next couple of months of my interviews scheduled already. I think Crystal will talk about what is coming up. But always you can email me and suggestions, questions. If you have an idea for something to specifically talk about like we do with JP, I am happy to discuss that with you. I know a couple of folks this last month sent me something saying, hey, you should talk about X, Y, and Z. I remember one specific case that was kind of time sensitive, so I did not talk about this month. I think I have got it in next month. So always looking for suggestions and ideas. And even if you want to be the interviewee, please, we are happy to do that. You are doing something great and wonderful at your library that you want to share with the rest of your colleagues. Get in touch with us, we will put you on. And it does not have to be something technology related. Michael's monthly tech talks are geared that direction. But anything you are doing, we can put you into an intercompass live. Yes. Not a problem. For example, related to gaming. I don't know if you can go to our Incubus Live Home page. Just Google Incubus. Yes. It is not until October, but I will just plug it right now. Hastings College, Perkins Library here in Nebraska, on October 20th, Susan Franklin will be doing a session about their gaming nights they do at the university library. So if you are interested in gaming from today, sign up and join us for that one. Next week will be a session on Heritage Quest, which is a database that we have through our Nebraska Access System of Databases where we have databases for Nebraska libraries. So if you're in a Nebraska library, that would be definitely something you would want to take a look at. Susan Nisley, one of our librarians here, will be showing that. And then this is just a list of our new upcoming sessions. It looks like next month I will be talking about eBooks. That's what you told me. Yep. So I put it on there. I have enough trouble keeping track of what I'm doing on Friday. So next month that is good too. So it looks like, let me just check here, no new questions or anything? I think we'll wrap it up for today. Thank you very much for attending and come us live this week in our Tech Talk. Hope you learned a lot. And we will see you next time. Thank you. Bye.