Thursday, October 25, 2007

Librarians and Second Life

The latest discussion in Second Life, the virtual world, was What is important for librarians to learn about Second Life and what role should they be taking? This discussion was led by Maggie Kohime (Lyn Parker in real life) yesterday in the Centre for Information Literacy Research, Eduserv Island. We had some people from the UK and some from North America. The log of our discussion is at http://sleeds.org/chatlog/?c=152 Lyn posed some questions for us, although we did not keep to these strictly:
1. Librarians need to be able to operate in SL in order to see the possibilities. What functions therefore do you consider to be most important and where should newbies concentrate their efforts first?
2. What things are librarians doing in Second Life? Are they different to RL activities? What scope does the environment give us to enable us to do things differently?3. What are the issues within Second Life that librarians with their various skills can help resolve?
Lyn also provided some references.
Grassian, E. and Trueman, R. B. (2007) "Stumbling, bumbling, teleporting and flying … librarian avatars in Second Life." Reference Services Review, 35 (1), 84 - 89.

Greenhill, Kathryn (2007) "Flying Librarians of Oz: Whats all the fuss about second life and whats it got to do with libraries." Presentation to the National Library of Australia on 14 February 2007. http://www.slideshare.net/sirexkat/
flying-librarians-of-oz-whats-all-the-fuss-
about-second-life-and-whats-it-got-to-
do-with-libraries

Hurst-Wahl, Jill (2007) "Librarians and Second Life: it's a source of information, a platform for networking, an opportunity to try out new approaches before you take them to the real world." Information Outlook, June. http://findarticles.com/p/
articles/mi_m0FWE/is_6_11/ai_n19311772/pg_1
The first picture shows discussion underway, and the second is of a meeting later that evening with North Lamar (Joe Sanchez in real life), a North American teacher and researcher, in the water garden I created on our island, Infolit iSchool.

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