GAMERT (Gaming) Round Table

GAMERT Board Meeting | July 10 at 10 AM ET

In Attendance: 

• Tina Coleman (Staff Liaison)
• Jennifer Bartlett (Pass President)
• Jessica Parij (President),
• Thomas Vose (President Elect)
• Erica Ruscio (Secretary)
• George Bergstrom (Treasurer)
• Tricia Boucher (______)
• Jessica Spears (______)
• Dan Major (______)

Introductions: We have some dedicated board members with a wide variety of experience in libraries and with gaming. Some are GAME RT veterans, others are newbs. Huzzah!

• Tina introduced herself and her role. Her role is to advise, support, and help in any way, whether it be securing meeting rooms (in physical conferences and in the virtual world), make cases to ALA for resources, make sure we get our membership numbers reported (reporting is kind of crazy now). In short, she is a helper and advisor but she does not make decisions. Tina is also a gamer! Her main passion is: “old school RPGs (Champions player from WAYBACK) but I also like some video games (PS4) and tabletop games.” Jenn added, “Tina is prompt, the best, and a great resource for someone like me who was such a newb. Any questions you have, ask!”
• George is currently in Indy and is the SW Regional Coordinator for the State Library in Indiana. He has been in libraries for a long time; although, he only recently began his new role. He has experience doing a lot of board games in classrooms when he was in academia. Currently, he is starting a virtual Game/Gaming RT in Indiana since most programming in the public libraries is gone or severely limited -- he is hoping to develop best practices for games programming virtually.
• Thomas is the director at Ruth Enlow Library in Appalachia (western Maryland). He enjoys personal gaming, consoles, computers, and tabletop rpgs. He runs occasional tournaments, and one goal he has is to work with RUSA  to develop a real nation-wide trivia championship at ALA. They are doing webinars in his state on Roll20 and Tabletopia. 
• Jessica P is the Department Head at Canton Public Library in Michigan. She joined GAME RT on a whim in the facebook group and is involved in gaming at her library. She built a board game collection at her previous library, and she knows that outreach is key this year for membership and getting people into volunteer roles. She acknowledged that they had had some trouble filling those positions last year. Personally, she loves computer games and library trivia… but tabletop is not her biggest jam.
• Jenn is the Head of Reference and Adult Services at Manchester Public Library in Connecticut. SHe has been gaming in libraries for almost 5 years now. She is a “go big or go home” kind of girl – an extrovert.
• Tricia is a User Experience Librarian at Texas state University in San Marcos, TX. She loves using gaming to teach people in classroom experiences. As for her game preferences, she is more of a traditionalist (like skeeball and pinball) which she finds more fun than video games. She also enjoys Cards Against Humanity and playing with friends. She is also on the Educause games and learning committee… she is excited about new connections! She also opened an augmented virtual reality studio to play and create games in the new makerspace at her library and is teaching DMing at her library.
• Erica Ruscio is a YA Librarian in a small coastal community on the South Shore of Mass (Ventress Memorial Library in Marshfield, MA). She is new to GAMERT. She likes D&D, tabletop games (recently, Lotus and Sushi Go), outdoor play and team building (ropes courses, project adventure, experiential learning). She runs D&D at the library and has helped run library outdoor and indoor play programs. She is starting a board game collection in the teen room.
• Jessica S is a YA Librarian at Brooklyn Public Library. She is starting a circulating board game collection with a grant -- they spent $3k on games and are now waiting for the games to arrive in shipment (that was delayed due to difficulties with COVID). She loves board games and runs long gaming sessions for the teens, attracting over 40 teens twice a week.
• Dan Major works at the Orion Township Public Library in Michigan where he runs D&D (and did his first online session a week ago which went great!). He joined GAME RT after ALA last year and saw their big green park setup and the presentation from Wizards of the Coast. He goes to a “shameful amount” of cons and is interested in looking into a book or game award as another form of outreach.

Tina’s Updates: Tina is our super awesome staff liaison to ALA. Here are the main points she shared with us.

• Tina also shared an overview of GAME RT. First, she iterated why we were so important as a RT: “There is no other entity like you. Nobody else is talking about gaming in libraries right now. … you are the experts.” GAME RT has been going into a new structure/reorganization over the last 3 years. There is no ALA rulebook on structuring RTs… so that could be frustrating, but then we have the advantage of defining this ourselves! We all are building this to be what we want and need it to be, to make it run in the way that makes sense to us. Past presidents Jenn, Jessica, and Thomas have done a lot of work over the past couple years to grow the RT. Still, Tina wanted to encourage everyone to feel okay with the fact that we cannot do everything in a year: “We are building something for the people who come after us to add to: strategies and goals and procedures that will make sense to the people who we pass the torch to.” 
• Tina also briefly overviewed what needed to be done: committee appointments need to be made (it is Jessica P’s main responsibility, but she can ask for help). Also, FINAL versions of any RT documents need to end up in Connect. We also have some things to accomplish by the end of July. We need to draft a welcome email for new members and possibly send weekly emails that go out to new members as well. We also need to send invitation emails to the email list from ALA virtual. Therefore, we need to write the emails for each of these two initiatives. 
• Tina also had exciting numbers for us! There were 809-890 people in the GAME RT president’s program, 609 booth visits, and 544 participants viewed the PDF for the booth. Huzzah! From the discussion on Connect, it seemed very successful. They are working on getting an official recording of the event for folks to watch after the fact. 
• Tina shared that Alfred is the chair of the International Games Week committee and that we need to pick someone on the board to be his shadow and backup and be super involved with IGW since they need plenty of help keeping this program running. We cannot lose traction two years in a row… this is our show piece! It takes place in November. George said he will help with IGW!

Committee Updates/Questions:

• Thomas had two updates: he added committee information in the handbook and he transferred ownership of Discord to Rebecca. 
• The current board listed on the GAME RT page is not updated: http://www.ala.org/rt/gamert/executive-board 
• Has anyone polled members for what they want from GAMERT? People want to get involved but don’t know how.

Outreach: We also had a lively discussion of how to advocate. Here are the main points.

• We need to also be sure to be rubbing elbows with game designers and publishers. Conventions are one way to do that. Jenn said, “We know that gaming in libraries is awesome, so our goal is to get the support of game designers and publishers, and the general public. We cannot do that if we are not at conventions. We need to be much more vocal and supportive in working with publishers and designers… in getting buy-in from the people that we need on our end to believe in us. 
• Jenn also talked about promoting relationships with Peach State Hobby Distribution, and how they’re making it more affordable for libraries to get games.
• We also briefly discussed the gaming grants that GAME RT offers that build GAME RT membership and also game programs in libraries.
• Tina mentioned how GenCon, GNC (graphic rt) never pays for booths at Read Pop Pop… do we want to look into something like this?
• Here were some of the conventions board members suggested: PAX Unplugged, San Diego Comic Con, NYCC, C2E2, ECCC, SDCC, Denver Comic COn, Boston Comic Con, and TCAF.

Other Updates: 

• Story cubes has a board game version!

• There is a Free Games for Change virtual conference next week! 
• Talk about meta- there was a tabletop game just on Kickstarter that was about shelving your games.

Next Steps:

• Everyone should look over and be prepared to discuss the Handbook.
• Jessica S will send out invites and an agenda for Friday, July 17 at 10 AM.