In a couple previous posts, I’ve talked about how libraries continue to circulate electronic literature on floppy disks, CD-ROMs, and other physical media. There are challenges to this — hardware and software becoming obsolete, the deterioration of information stored on that physical media — but the benefit of this approach is that libraries can treat these works of electronic literature in much the same way as works of print literature. CD-ROMs are stored on a shelf right next to books.

I’ve continued to do a bit of research on how libraries are keeping up these legacy collections of electronic literature on physical media, some of which I hope to share soon, but that work got me interested in how libraries are collecting electronic literature not released on any kind of physical media. I started thinking about how libraries could collect games released through online storefronts like Steam. It seemed very clear that libraries would be interested in collecting these kinds of games, and I was surprised that no one had developed a real solution for this yet. Libraries have been collecting ebooks and digital video for many years now, so why not games?

The short answer is that the gaming industry is not ready to play ball with libraries. Book and film publishers have seen the value (and frankly, profit potential) of licensing digital content to libraries. There are some huge issues with this as libraries pay a ton of money to essentially rent this content, and are no longer taking on the stewardship role that libraries have played for centuries. But libraries are providing access to information that their patrons need through these methods. So far, game publishers and platforms have either ignored, dismissed, or been hostile to libraries wanting to collect, preserve, and provide access to games. I hope that can change, in part by librarians coming together collectively and demonstrating the value and viability of libraries collecting digital-only games.

The first product of that research effort is now ready to share, an article that I wrote with a couple UNCG MLIS alumni, Jerry Reed and Chloe Lanham.¹ We interviewed librarians at 13 academic libraries that are starting to explore digital game collecting initiatives and discussed their ideal (and pragmatic) solutions for collecting and providing access to digital games. The upshot is that libraries largely want their game collections to follow existing practices for other kinds of electronic resources, so working with some external platform (like Steam…) that actually manages the games and facilitates access to authenticated library users.

The article is unfortunately behind a paywall and I can’t post a version of the paper to my institutional repository for another year, BUT the article is available without any restrictions at all until September 13, 2024 using this link: https://authors.elsevier.com/a/1jUXhMYb6Z-wQ. Read and share widely!

This is the first step in this research. I’m excited to share what the next steps will be…very soon!

1. Colin Post, Jerry Reed, and Chloe Lanham, “Considerations and Challenges for Collecting Digital Games in Academic Libraries,” The Journal of Academic Librarianship 50, no. 5 (2024): https://doi.org/10.1016/j.acalib.2024.102931. ↩︎