"The Collecting Itself Feels Good": Towards Collection Interfaces for Digital Game Objects

© Lennart Nacke, 2016. This is the author’s version of the work. It is posted here for your personal use. Not for redistribution. The definitive version was published in CHI PLAY Companion '16 Proceedings of the 2016 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play Companion Extended Abstracts, https://doi.org/10.1145/2967934.2968088Digital games offer a variety of collectible objects. We investigate players' collecting behaviors in digital games to determine what digital game objects players enjoyed collecting and why they valued these objects. Using this information, we seek to inform the design of future digital game object collection interfaces. We discuss the types of objects that players prefer, the reasons that players value digital game objects, and how collection behaviors may guide play. Through our findings, we identify design implications for digital game object collection interfaces: enable object curation, preserve rules and mechanics, preserve context of play, and allow players to share their collections with others. Digital game object collection interfaces are applicable to the design of digital games, gamified applications, and educational software.Canadian Network for Research and Innovation in Machining Technology, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of CanadaPeer-reviewe

Modern Special Collections Cataloguing: A University of London Case Study

Recent years have seen a growing emphasis on modern special collections (in themselves no new phenomenon), with a dichotomy between guidance for detailed cataloguing in Descriptive Cataloging of Rare Materials (Books) (DCRM(B), 2007) and the value of clearing cataloguing backlogs expeditiously. This article describes the De la Mare Family Archive of Walter de la Mare's Printed Oeuvre at Senate House Library, University of London, as an example of a modern author collections in an institutional library. It sets out the particular cataloguing challenges faced, looking at both general and copy-specific features and discussing the relation between bibliography and catalogue when no comprehensive bibliography exists. It confirms the adequacy of AACR2 for general cataloguing purposes, while noting the benefit of DCRM(B)’s more expansive copy-specific instructions

Reading and Ownership

First paragraph: ‘It is as easy to make sweeping statements about reading tastes as to indict a nation, and as pointless.’ This jocular remark by a librarian made in the Times in 1952 sums up the dangers and difficulties of writing the history of reading. As a field of study in the humanities it is still in its infancy and encompasses a range of different methodologies and theoretical approaches. Historians of reading are not solely interested in what people read, but also turn their attention to the why, where and how of the reading experience. Reading can be solitary, silent, secret, surreptitious; it can be oral, educative, enforced, or assertive of a collective identity. For what purposes are individuals reading? How do they actually use books and other textual material? What are the physical environments and spaces of reading? What social, educational, technological, commercial, legal, or ideological contexts underpin reading practices? Finding answers to these questions is compounded by the difficulty of locating and interpreting evidence. As Mary Hammond points out, ‘most reading acts in history remain unrecorded, unmarked or forgotten’. Available sources are wide but inchoate: diaries, letters and autobiographies; personal and oral testimonies; marginalia; and records of societies and reading groups all lend themselves more to the case-study approach than the historical survey. Statistics offer analysable data but have the effect of producing identikits rather than actual human beings. The twenty-first century affords further possibilities, and challenges, with its traces of digital reader activity, but the map is ever-changing

Schoolbooks and textbook publishing.

In this chapter the author looks at the history of schoolbooks and textbook publishing. The nineteenth century saw a rise in the school book market in Britain due to the rise of formal schooling and public examinations. Although the 1870 Education and 1872 (Scotland) Education Acts made elementary education compulsory for childern between 5-13 years old, it was not until the end of the First World War that some sort form of secondary education became compulsory for all children

Bibliographers and the Library

published or submitted for publicatio

An Exploration of New Methods of Ceramic Analysis: Examining Pottery Sherds from American Samoa using Computed Tomography, Physical Examination, and Residue Analysis

Materials from archaeological assemblages around the world have been examined using a variety of methods in order to obtain data that can contribute to our understanding of past societies, cultures, and behaviors. In particular, ceramics have been analyzed to obtain data that can be used to determine how pottery was manufactured and how its use changed over time. While many ceramic analyses employ established methods of examination such as physical analysis, new methods have been developed. This thesis explored the use of computed tomography (CT), physical examination, and residue analysis to examine a collection of pottery sherds from four archaeological sites in American Samoa. The results obtained from this research were used to determine if CT and residue analysis could be viable for ceramic analysis in addition to determining if changes in ceramic manufacture could be documented over space and time in American Samoa