Students can check out more than just books at the undergraduate library, choosing from the extensive movie and film collection to electronic equipment. However, they can now take advantage of the library’s latest installment – video games.

Lisa Hinchliffe, head of the undergraduate library, said the library has consoles that cannot be checked out, including the PS3, original Nintendo and a Wii, which is on its way. The library also stocks a vintage gaming collection that cannot be taken out. However, all other games can be checked out for one week.

The undergraduate library committed to the idea of stocking video games as early as spring of 2006 for three main reasons: research needs, preserving culture, and teaching and entertainment purposes.

“These are three different goals, but all serve a purpose in the video gaming collection,” Hinchliffe said.

There is a group of faculty at the University who are doing research on gaming and the library is doing its best to supply resources for such research, Hinchliffe said.

Michelle Hinn, a graduate student in educational psychology and an instructor in Library and Information Science, is researching on accessibility in video games for the disabled. Hinn is working to promote awareness about giving the option of playing video games to people with disabilities.

Hinn campaigns for video game developers to think about ways of designing their games to accommodate disabled people, such as captioning games, changing the layout of game controllers, easier modes of play and better gaming manuals. Hinn said she believes in the “right of fun.”

“The ‘right of fun’ is this idea that games are important, that leisure is important to all of us,” Hinn said. “There’s something I like about video games and I want others to partake in that performance. That’s what drives me to try to get word out as much as possible.”

Hinchliffe added that the library is collecting video games because no other library is doing similar things for any other reason than for entertainment. Cultural preservation is significant in that video games are a cultural production of contemporary society, Hinchliffe said. “One of the important things libraries do is collect the intellectual output of not only scholars, but our culture as a whole,” Hinchliffe said. “We think it’s important to capture these and to preserve them because people want to use them now and probably analyze them in 30 years.”

The last mission the library strived to fulfill is providing resources for class material. Hinchliffe said the library has been asked to make games available to students for them to play and analyze.

Christian Sandvig, professor in speech communications, is teaching Communication Technology & Society, a class involving video games.

He said he is pleased with the library’s video game collection because it is now an important emerging area in communications.

“We use a popular video game (Civilization IV) as an example of simulation,” Sandvig said. “Simulation is a very prominent method in social science.”

To date, the library does not know the exact number of how many games they hold, but they carry a variety of games for different platforms. For now, the University library is continuing to purchase video games and hopes to see more students taking advantage of such a unique service.

“We’re a leader in the library world,” Hinchliffe said.

What you can check out

Systems

• Nintendo DS
• Sony PSP

Games for different consoles

• PS2
• PS3
• Sony PSP
• GameCube
• Nintendo DS
• Wii
• XBox
• XBox360

To see what games you can check out and for more on the University’s rental program go to http://www.library.uiuc.edu/gaming/