This article is from the first edition of The Video Game Librarian website I published between 2008 and 2010. It was originally written on June 30, 2008.

The American Library Association has announced that they have received a $1 million grant from the Verizon Foundation to “track and measure the impact of gaming on literacy skills and build a model for library gaming.” The eventual plan is to offer this model to librarians across the country.

The grant was announced at the ALA’s annual conference, which took place over the weekend.

As part of the grant, the American Library Association will work directly with 12 leading gaming experts to document the use of gaming as a literacy tool and monitor the results of gaming initiatives. The information will be used to build “The Librarians’ Guide to Gaming,” a comprehensive, online literacy and gaming toolbox, which will then be field-tested by additional libraries.

The gaming experts that will build this Librarians’ Guide to Gaming come from the following libraries:

• Ann Arbor District Library, Ann Arbor, Mich.;
• Public Library of Charlotte-Mecklenburg County, Charlotte, N.C.;
• Columbus Metropolitan Library, Columbus, Ohio;
• Georgetown County Library, Georgetown, S.C.;
• Minneapolis Public Library, Minneapolis, Minn.;
• Old Bridge Public Library, Fords, N.J.;
• Pima County Public Library, Tucson, Ariz.;
• Reidland High School, Paducah, Ky.;
• School Library System of Genesee Valley BOCES, Le Roy, N.Y.;
• The New York Public Library, New York;
• Todd Wehr Library, De Pere, Wis.;
• University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, Ill.

For those who regularly contribute to the LibGaming Google Group, the names of these libraries (and the librarians who have been tagged as “gaming experts”) may look familiar to you. I wish them the best of luck as they build the Librarians’ Guide to Gaming and I hope to hear more about their progress soon.