Report: Massive Video Game Collection at University of Toronto a Gamechanger for Research, Education
From the CBC:
Space Invaders might not immediately come to mind when considering academic materials, but educators in the video game field recognize the value of accessing vintage games for research, and University of Toronto Mississauga has won big.
The university acquired the Syd Bolton collection — which includes more than 14,000 titles and around 5,000 magazines from the last 50 years of video game history, along with dozens of consoles and systems.
“We have Atari 2600 game titles, some from the more familiar Nintendo entertainment system, Sega Genesis, all the way up to the modern PlayStation and Xbox game titles,” explained Chris Young, head of Collections and Digital Scholarship at University of Toronto Mississauga.
“A feature I find most valuable is the fact that most of the games we have include all the packaging and game manuals,” he said.
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“They’re arguably the largest entertainment industry in the world – with a huge impact on everyday life,” says Christopher Young, the head of collections and digital scholarship at the University of Toronto Mississauga Library. “Video games were the canary in the coal mine for digital life.
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“There are only a few places in the world, let alone North America, that have a collection of this size,” says Young, who is serving as the collection’s first curator. By contrast, the U.S. Library of Congress boasts only 7,000 games.
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The U of T Mississauga Library has even set up video monitors in its reading room so that any student, professor, or community member can make an appointment to examine a game and play it.
Meanwhile, Young and his team are currently hard at work cataloging the enormous collection of games and consoles, and doing light repairs so they’re all in working order.
It’s a curious form of preservation work. Young, who used to work for U of T’s Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, does a digital-age version of the work done at Fisher on works that are hundreds of years old. For example, he’s spent the last few weeks opening Nintendo cartridges and carefully cleaning them so their electrical contacts work perfectly.
“These things were meant to be used,” he says of the games. “They’re meant to be played.”
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See Also: Syd Bolton Collection Information Page (via University of Toronto Mississauga Library)
Filed under: Libraries, News, Preservation
About Gary Price
Gary Price (gprice@gmail.com) is a librarian, writer, consultant, and frequent conference speaker based in the Washington D.C. metro area. He earned his MLIS degree from Wayne State University in Detroit. Price has won several awards including the SLA Innovations in Technology Award and Alumnus of the Year from the Wayne St. University Library and Information Science Program. From 2006-2009 he was Director of Online Information Services at Ask.com.