Le développement de collections de jeux vidéo dans les bibliothèques universitaires en Amérique du Nord : étude exploratoire
Video games are culturally and socially important; they are part of daily life for most North Americans and were the most profitable leisure industry of 2014. Interest in this document was sparked in the academic community and several disciplines have studied it, such as psychology, sociology and information science. Some universities have created entire departments devoted to the study of video games: Game Studies. This rise in interest sometimes leads to the creation of a video games collection in academic libraries; this issue is not addressed in academic literature, however, only professional. This research aims to bring a scientific and objective viewpoint to an issue many academic libraries may experience. To do so, we conducted a multiple case study and interviewed librarians, members of the libraries’ staff, teachers and students of two universities, one Canadian and the other, American. This qualitative approach was chosen to answer our four research questions: [1] What are the elements influencing the development of video game collections?, [2] How do professionals treat video games in their collection development activities?, [3] How are video games used by patrons of academic libraries?, and [4] What is the impact of video games on the libraries’ employees tasks?  The results show that the elements influencing the development of video game collections in academic libraries are mostly organisational and financial and that technological elements have to be taken into account when doing retrospective collection development. The development of video game collections differs from that of traditional documents in academic libraries, because librarians choose titles one by one and the important selection criteria include the users’ demands and the support to access the information in the game. Furthermore, clerks and other employees may have to clean and repair objects that are not working properly. The potential users of these collections – teachers and students using video games for teaching or for research – do not use the library’s resources, mainly because they are unaware of them, but also because they cannot borrow them and bring them home. Finally, other than the tasks related to the development of the video game collection, the impact on the employees is minimal, notably because these resources are isolated in the libraries and because employees do not work with other types of documents.
Academic libraries Audiovisual documents Collection development Video games