With a few hundred titles, a collection of video games at the University of Illinois Undergraduate Library may not rival your favorite game rental place.

But while the games can be checked out and played, that is only one point of the collection, which David Ward, head of information services at the library, started putting together last spring.

Ward, already interested in games both for fun and as cultural artifacts, was inspired when campus researchers who do game-related work started an online mailing list to share information among themselves.

He put out a call for old games and game systems, resulting in a small vintage game collection.

"(The response) was actually pretty enthusiastic," Ward said. "People were excited that we were doing this."

The library also dedicated a little money in its acquisitions budget for a small stream of current titles, which Ward said tend to go out of print a lot faster than books, for gaming literature both academic and popular, and for hardware. (Be jealous: A PlayStation 3 arrived recently, and a Nintendo Wii is on the way.)

Ward has mounted "gaming nights" to promote the collection and highlight the game-related research on campus.

"It's (the collection) going to be a great asset for anybody doing research on games, whether it be a student or a faculty member," said UI Professor Dmitri Williams, who spoke at one of the events. "Step one for researchers is making sure you have access to the stuff."

Williams is a UI speech communication professor who studies the social impact of new technologies and has a special interest in video games. He has produced studies on such topics as real-life relationships fashioned from playing online multiplayer games and the impact of video-game violence.

Williams is part of a small but growing cadre of UI faculty members researching aspects of gaming and using games in classroom or research contexts, from the arts to computer science.

UI music and computer science Professor Guy Garnett, who got the electronic mailing list started, has students working on open source software tools to expand the capabilities of the online game "Second Life," which he's already used for hybrid virtual and real-world performance pieces and to probe issues involved in creating art, like sculptures, in a virtual world.

Garnett, who co-directs the UI Cultural Computing Lab, also is looking at ways to use games to get kids more involved in science and math and he is among those working on a game development track in computer science.

Williams said work by UI researchers like Garnett and Michelle Hinn, who's become internationally known for promoting accessibility features in games, is starting to give the university a reputation in the field.

Meanwhile, the UI Graduate School of Library and Information Science, in collaboration with Stanford and the University of Maryland, has a proposal pending with the Library of Congress for a major project looking at how archivists might preserve games so they're accessible in the future.

That's not as easy as pulling a book off the shelf, opening it up and reading it, said Janet Eke of the UI library school, who's working on the project.

Games, for one thing, need hardware to operate, which may or may not be available in the future. It may be possible to emulate that on other machines, but the titles don't normally include instructions for how to go about it, nor are there standards for such information. Then there is the question of whether an emulator provides an accurate rendition of the game experience, rather than a CliffsNotes version, so to speak.

Eke said the UI is proposing to work on such things as "meta-data" standards that could, in effect, wrap games in an information package at the computer code level designed to guide the migration of the titles to new hardware or emulation schemes.

Among other things, the project also would look at some ideas for preserving content created in multiplayer games, like "Second Life," where players actually act as content creators.

Five years ago, it might have been considered odd to study video games and think about archiving them for the future, Williams said, but "now it's starting to be pretty normal."

From a library's perspective, holding games isn't any different than offering CDs, DVDs (and video tapes before that), or newspapers and magazines, Ward said. The games, like the other popular materials they share the shelves with, can be entertaining, educational, revealing where culture and society at the time they were created are concerned, or all that at once.

"A lot of public libraries have started gaming collections as well," Ward said. "It's another format."