Publications and Research
Document Type
Blog Post
Publication Date
Spring 6-15-2015
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.
Comments
Guest blog post on ACRLog.org, in collaboration with Maura Smale (New York City College of Technology), available at: http://acrlog.org/2015/06/15/collecting-cats-library-lessons-from-neko-atsume/