International Games Week 2017 is fast approaching, and a new post from Colleen Ellithorpe, the Teen Services Librarian at Saratoga Springs Public Library on Programming Librarian discusses some of the benefits of participating in the event and offers up a few resources to help get you started:

Whether you’ve always been a proponent of gaming in the library or were late to the party, games have found their place in adult and teen programming. According to ALA’s Games and Gaming Round Table’s (GameRT) 2016 International Games Week (IGW) report, about 82 percent of public libraries participating already had a collection of either tabletop or console games. Some libraries loan games while others focus on game events. As technology becomes less expensive and community needs shift, we will certainly see continued growth of gaming events in public libraries.

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If your library currently doesn’t have game programming, IGW is a great time to introduce the idea, experiment with games temporarily and gauge the response!

International Games Week 2007 will take place from October 20th through November 4th.