Games About Librarianship

While doing a random search for Library newsfeeds I came across these two games developed by Carnagie Mellon University Libraries. One is fair, the other is brilliant.

http://www.library.cmu.edu/Libraries/etc/index.html

Within Range is what a lot of people think Librarians do all day, put books back on shelves according to an esoteric classification system. I have used a similar game as part of a training session when I was a library assistant during grad school. It is an OK way to start to understand the mechanics if not the purpose of the Library of Congress classification system. We librarians really don't do all that much of this stuff though, it is usually up to pages and shelvers to handle this kind of book traffic.

I'll Get It though is just brilliant. It creates a nice little flash model of the real life of reference librarianship and public service. If you want to get any sense of what I really do all day (in between class visits, programming, collection development and the like) this is your ticket in. Seriously.