Collecting Cats: Library Lessons from Neko Atsume

Abstract

This blog post is the culmination of a Twitter conversation between librarians talking about their experiences playing a phone game. The game is called Nekoatsume and it involves taking care of digital cats in a virtual backyard. Nekoatsume is entirely in Japanese, a key fact that actually started the Twitter conversation (and not the fact that the game involves cats, as might be expected). Despite the language barrier, Nekoatsume is remarkably user-friendly; library databases should be just as user-friendly as a game in a foreign language, but too often they’re not. With so many variables in acquiring research — design, functionality, search queries, tutorials — the outcome of research can be overshadowed by the multitude of platform interfaces, both within the library and on the open Web