Developed under a National Leadership Grant from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, this open-source game teaches students research and information literacy skills. The game takes place online, so faculty do not have to set aside precious, in-class time for students to practice and develop these skills.

 

BiblioBouts is the second library skills game created under Markey’s leadership. The first game showed the design team that game play cannot appear unrelated to students’ coursework, lest it be seen as a waste of time. Instead, it must be integrated into and enhance workflow early in the semester. Students value the way that BiblioBouts helps them complete assigned coursework and, ideally, earns them course credit.

 

Each mini-game or “bout” focuses on a single skill, demonstrating discrete and repeatable steps of a structured research workflow. In response to an assigned topic, players search library databases. They capture citations and full texts with Zotero (open-source bibliographic software) for “donation” to a shared database. Students tag each other’s sources by subject discipline, keywords, audience level, and format type. They also score the source’s credibility and relevance. Both quantity and quality matter, and students can see how their judgments compare to those of their peers.

 

Karen Markey (Information)