Hello -
I'm hoping to get a sense of what other public libraries are doing regarding M-rated video games in their circulating collections.
We have a very small and very fledgling video game collection that is available for circulation. It is housed entirely in our Teen Library. There are no other libraries in our county or district that collect or circulate video games.
Our Teen Librarian received a video game donation that they would like to add to the collection that includes several M-rated games. There's some question about what we should or shouldn't do with these, and I'm looking for some collective wisdom from the other wonderful folks in this RT.
I've done some cursory research online - there's an old thread in this discussion forum about Elmhurst Public Library doing some work/research in this area, but unfortunately the linked PDF is no longer available and I can't find it anywhere else yet. The other information I have found has mostly been about -playing- M-rated games during events, and that's not really a thing we're interested in exploring yet.
The assumptions that are in place for our specific library:
- all video games are cataloged and housed in the Teen Library. The Adult department has no interest in maintaining a video game collection at this time.
- I'd like to include these in the collection somehow, so I don't need to be convinced about the merits of doing so (or not doing so). Inquiring purely about potential logistical options.
- though we have three separate "libraries," each housed on their own floor of the building (Children's, Teen, and Adult), people of all ages are allowed unrestricted access to the collections on any floor. So children and teens can use and check out materials from the adult library with no issue, and vice versa. But there is this overall sense that everything on the Teen floor is specifically geared towards people ages 13-18, children's floor is under 13, adult floor is over 18. Most of the rated M games specify that they're intended for ages 17+, so they're sort of an edge case.
I don't believe in restricting library materials as a rule, so my inclination is to simply catalog these with the rest of our video games and make them just as available as we make everything else. But I've also seen some case studies where libraries ask parents to sign permission slips in order to loan M-rated video games to patrons under 17, for example.
At the moment, I think my options are something like:
1. Add them to the collection like normal, put them on the shelf with the rest of the video games, don't mark them or draw attention to them, move on with my life.
2. Do #1, but put a special note in the catalog to help make sure the patron knows that these are rated M and what that means. I'm a former cataloger, so this would be something beyond what goes in MARC field 521, since our catalog doesn't make that readily visible - I'm thinking it would be a special note or a pop-up that appears upon check out or something.
3. Do #1, but shelve them in a special place so people know they're rated M.
4. Do #1, but put some sort of sticker on them or a note that says "hey this is rated M!"
5. Add them to the collection but figure out a way to require parental permission, or to verify patron age before loaning (we don't verify patron age for any other materials, so this seems weird to me, and I wouldn't really consider it except that other libraries seem to be doing it).
6. Split the video game collection and have M-rated games in the Adult Library and other games in the Teen Library. We currently do this for graphic novels. We have no collections budget for video games so rely almost entirely on donations, so the video game collection in the Adult Library would basically be like 5 games? But we gotta start somewhere. This also raises the question of if we should split E rated games into our Children's Library. There's something nice right now about having all the games in one place and just telling any patron, regardless of age, that they can find games on the second floor.
I imagine this is a question that has been discussed a lot, so apologies for re-treading any old territory here. Thanks in advance for any input and advice!
Best,
-Shanna
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Shanna Hollich
shollich@gmail.com------------------------------