Our guest this week is Jenn Bartlett, “The Boardgame Librarian”. Jenn works at a public library in Connecticut, and part of her job is to “cultivate a boardgame collection, run a boardgame program, and do a lot of outreach and education too. I get to be an awesome librarian who works with awesome boardgames!” Have you always wanted to be a librarian? “I probably should have known… I always had a book with me.” But Jenn originally studied journalism in college. Graduating in 2008, newspapers and journalism were changing a lot, and jobs were hard to find. Jenn had worked part-time in a library while in school, and figured maybe that could work for a while. “Life is never exactly what we think it’s going to be.” How did you go from librarian to boardgame librarian? Jenn credits her husband for getting her started with games. It’s always been a big part of his life, and now it’s a big part of Jenn’s life too. She made it a component of her job, because she approached her director to talk about the power of different things that can change people. Not just books, but gaming and experiences can also bring people together and make connections. It didn’t start with the collection, it started with running a boardgaming group. Jenn wanted to see if there was any interest in gaming at the library, since her city already has 2 game stores and a large meet-up group. After the group was already quite strong, Jenn and her fellow librarians decided to undertake the task of adding many of the games for general circulation. (Here Jenn encourages us to reach out to our local library and see about doing boardgame meetups there. We discuss the game scene in our local area… or lack thereof.) How did you start the gaming group? About three years ago, Jenn pitched a monthly game group for adults to her boss. “This is happening, and it’s going to be amazing.” Jenn attended GenCon and pitched her library group to several publishers for donations. Rio Grande Games and GMT were the all-stars, donating several games each. The very first meeting of the game group had 18 people! They quickly determined that 2½ hours was not long enough, especially if they wanted to play crunchier games. What does the library gaming group look like now? Attendance now is normally 25-45 people. The group is very friendly; half the attendees are female and many of them are Millennials. The library gaming group runs for 4 hours once a month, and is focused on teaching and demos. People generally don’t bring in their own games, since there’s too much risk of damage. Jenn makes about 5 games available each session, and now she has volunteer teachers to help run games, too. Since all the setup is already done at the library, players don’t have to stress about setup or reading the rulebook. Just sit down and play. How did you get boardgames into circulation? Jenn decided with the game collection they had built for the gaming group, it should really be available to the general public. Besides the processing involved, there were a lot of decisions to be made: how long the games could be checked out, whether they could be returned at other branches, what the fines should be, how many games could a patron check out. The processing also involved lots of bagging and stickers and security procedures. (Security: all the pieces get counted. The circulation staff was not terribly excited at this prospect.) Jenn reveals that one of the most popular games at the library is Dominant Species – an incredibly hard, incredibly complex game. But it has cute dinosaurs!