Okay so Lemontree which is the first iteration of Librarygame we’re developing for the University of Huddersfield is a way of embedding game mechanics into the very fabric of library interactions, to basically do the following:

• encourage library use amongst low - non users.
• make library activity subtly visible on channels students are frequenting and make the library market itself decisively on social streams. 
• we want to associate and imbue what would ordinarily be quite a dry set of interactions with a sense of fun, adventure and playfulness.
• we want to leverage game mechanics in positive way in engaging learners and sparking microsocial interaction and serendipity. For example what would it take for two disparate disciplines to learn of each other and find an area of mutual overlap over something seemingly frivolous?

as a business, what we’re trying to do is find a sustainable way of making this product grow into the Foursquare or Gowalla of the library world! we genuinely mean it too! We’re bootstrapping the hell out of this thing, and injecting our own money and that of our clients into making it work by any ‘semi sane’ means necessary. 

What we’re afraid people might misconstrue this as.

• oh here’s another company, who have thought of a a way of ‘tacking’ on game mechanics into a library setting :( , to us, as gamers, casual gamers and former academics, it really is about seeing whether meaningful but small interventions or incentives can have a measurable impact on library usage and having the daring to implement them and iterate, we’re concerned about the diminishing attention being lavished on libraries, and want to do our bit but quite strategically and with focus on refining what we’re good at!

History

This is the project our first funding proposal and work on this dates back to 2007 when ‘gamification’ (oh god we hate that word too)  REALLY wasn’t trendy! 

Back then RITH didnt exist, and Lemontree wasn’t even a seedling concept, it was a research area that failed to get competitive internal funding, it didn’t carry on simply because there was no RITH to make it happen.