more on Everything Bad is Good for You

If everything "bad" is indeed good for you, what does this mean for the world of Libraries and/or Educational organizations?

I think this just means that libraries and other educational institutions will have to learn to adapt and embrace new things, just as they have done for decades. There was a time when people felt that novels weren't appropriate materials for libraries, but in this day and age no one even questions whether or not the public library will have the new James Patterson or Nora Roberts. At this point, we say "as long as they're reading."

So it will go with gaming. We'll say "at least they're in the library" and "at least they're learning something" (if, indeed, everything bad is good for you and they really are learning something). We already offer magazines that embrace pop culture like US Weekly, Electronic Gaming Monthly, and Lucky, and we circulate DVDs and VHS and we have computers available that people use to keep up with their Facebook pages. Gaming is just the next step in library adaptation and staying relevant to users.

After all, I don't think it's really for libraries or librarians to make value judgments, but rather to provide the information resources that people want (and in the "everything bad is good" context, I think we can call video games "information resources"), just as we would when checking out a book we find personally distasteful.