Mar 12

Information Services survey in Second Life

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The “IS Cream Van” project is a collaborative project amongst Information Services colleagues at the University of Edinburgh. The project aims to research Information Services support in virtual worlds such as Second Life.

The IS Cream Van is parked in Holyrood Park (Vue South), Second Life at: http://slurl.com/secondlife/Vue%20South/112/159/21. Please feel free to visit. If you would prefer a tour then contact Frank Lassard in world. Photos of the IS Cream Van are available: http://www.flickr.com/photos/flittleton/sets/72157622651729745/

We would kindly ask you to take time to complete our project survey. The aim of this survey is to gather views on whether there a role for Information Services in virtual worlds, and if so, what should it look like. The survey results will be incorporated in reports on the IS Cream Van. This survey is completely anonymous. Any identifiable information will be removed prior to reporting. This survey will take @15 minutes to complete.

The survey is available at:
https://www.survey.ed.ac.uk/is-cream-van/

If you would like to know more about this or any other Virtual University of Edinburgh project then please contact fiona.littleton@ed.ac.uk or visit http://www.vue.ed.ac.uk.

(Please feel free to pass on to colleagues you think might be interested).

Thank you,
Fiona

Fiona Littleton
Educational Development Adviser for Virtual Worlds
University of Edinburgh

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Mar 05

The Void Library: update from Worcester

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Elizabeth Swift, from the University of Worcester, provides todays featured submission to snapshot #8.

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Void, a performance company based at University of Worcester, is exploring how Virtual Worlds are changing the nature of storytelling in a new Second Life library project called The Void Library, that has been built above the University of Worcester Island. Visitors are able to access books, listen to stories and experience narratives appearing out of thin air as their avatars explore the multi-levelled virtual library. The Void Library is based on ideas from a short story by the Argentinean writer, Jorge Luis Borges, called ‘The Library of Babel’. This story tells of an impossibly huge library which contains every book which ever has, or could be, written – the only problem is there is no means of anyone finding any particular book and lifetimes are spent fruitlessly searching for meaningful information among the baffling array of texts.

Inside The Void Library

The Void Library in Second Life explores the difficulty of meaningful choice in an environment of abundant information. It provokes some serious and playful questions about just how stories can be experienced in digital environments where the acts of ‘authoring’ and ‘reception’ are similarly challenged. Visitors are allowed to glimpse real texts, lift books off shelves and sit down to read them on comfy chairs. But The Void Library is also a perilous space and it is quite easy for avatars to fall from the building to the distant ground below, or to get sidetracked into stories that seem to be continually changing in a space that mutates with every visit.

The Void Library project, which has been funded and supported by the University of Worcester, was initially presented at the International Conference on the Arts in Society in Venice last July. It will feature in an article about narrative development in Virtual Worlds to be published later this year in the International Journal of Performance Arts and Digital Media and Performance.

A Reading Room in The Void Library

The Void Library was made by Liz Swift and Peter Ireland . It can be found at http://slurl.com/secondlife/University%20of%20Worcester/192/215/23.

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Feb 19

The Future is Now: Libraries and Museums in Virtual Worlds

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An online conference organised by several US library, informatics and virtual world organisations. Note that there is still time to submit a poster.

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Everyone is invited to participate in The Future is Now: Libraries and Museums in Virtual Worlds, an online conference to be held on Friday and Saturday, March 5-6, 2010 in OPAL, the webconferencing collaborative service, in Second Life, and in other three-dimensional virtual worlds.

Throughout this two-day conference there will be dozens of presentations, panel discussions, poster sessions, demonstrations, tours, and social events. You need not be proficient in virtual worlds to participate in this conference. Orientation sessions will be held prior to the conference dates.

Keynote Speakers:

- Marilyn Johnson, author of the new book, This Book is Overdue! How Librarians and Cybrarians Can Save Us All. She also wrote The Dead Beat: Lost Souls, Lucky Stiffs, and the Perverse Pleasures of Obituaries.
- Tom Atkinson teaches Instructional Technology at the U. of Central Florida and has over 30 years of experience in designing, producing, delivering, and evaluating interactive instruction on mobile learning platforms and in virtual worlds
- Sharon Tettegah and Cynthia Colongne, co-authors of the 2009 book, Identity, Learning and Support in Virtual Environments.

Conference Website: http://www.opal-online.org/finindex.htm

Registration Fees:

$25 for individuals who are members of the American Library Association (ALA).
$45 for individuals who are not members of ALA.
$10 for individuals who are students, retired, or between jobs.
$75 for Groups (A group is defined as two or more individuals who are currently directly affiliated with an organization. Participating members of the registering organization need not be in the same location in the real world when they attend conference events.)

Register Now: http://www.eventbee.com/view/trendytopics/event?eid=604481373

Twitter Hashtag: #FIN10

Poster Session Proposals: Although the deadline for submitting program proposals has passed, the deadline for poster session proposals is Monday, March 1, 2010. See the conference website for details.

Sponsor: LearningTimes (http://www.learningtimes.org/), an open community of education and training professionals.
Conference Co-Organizers: ALA VCL MIG (Virtual Communities & Libraries, Member Initiative Group), ACRL Virtual Worlds Interest Group, the Alliance Library System, and TAP Information Services.
Conference Archive: We plan to record and archive as many events as possible. Only paid registrants, presenters, and members of the conference planning team will have access to the conference archive for 3 months after the conclusion of the conference. On June 6, 2010 the conference archive will be made available to everyone.

More Information: Please contact Tom Peters: tpeters (@) tapinformation.com

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Feb 19

Southampton Solent University in Second Life: library update

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A short update from Mary Hudson and Alison Williams, for the current snapshot, on library developments in Second Life at Southampton Solent University:

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Solent Life 2 is the Library area of the 3 part Solent Life island developed for Southampton Solent University. It was developed by the Business Librarians as part of a funded project. In late 2009 a training session was organised for all interested library staff to learn more about Second Life and Solent Life in particular. 10 attended and our Learning Technologist trainer, took us through Virtual Ability for basic orientation and into Solent Life. As a result we can now offer multi-subject library and information skills support in Second Life and we look forward to meeting and working with a wider range of students and academic staff in there this year.

We hope to arrange follow up meetings and visits to keep everyone’s skills going and to keep interest in the site alive.

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Dec 06

Information Services for learners in Second Life

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When: Monday 7 December 2009, 12 noon – 1pm SL time (8pm-9pm UK time: see
http://tinyurl.com/ydyvcv9 for times around the world)

Where: Infolit iSchool, Second Life
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Infolit%20iSchool/127/244/21/

Pancha Enzyme leads a discussion about providing information services for learners in Second Life. Pancha is a librarian at Edinburgh University and also part of a Second Life teaching team. She and her colleagues have developed the “IS cream van” as one approach to meeting information needs and questions. She will talk about this (and probably let you see the van!) and we will also be interested in hearing others’ ideas.

(Though if you want to see it beforehand, here’s a screenshot of it, in the Virtual World use in UK Education Flickr picture pool).

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Mar 16

Sheila Webber

People, Podcasts, Social media 2 Comments »

It’s 16th March, so in today’s Start the Week podcast Sheila Webber describes some of the information science-oriented work she has been doing in Second Life.

Sheila is the most well-known, and possibly longest developer and teacher, of Second Life in the UK academic library and information science sector. She has a reassuring low-tec page of work and personal information at the Department of Information Studies in the University of Sheffield, where she is a senior lecturer.

She also maintains an entertaining (but also informative) blog about her Second Life activities, Adventures of Yoshikawa, which is written in the style in Bridget Jones(!)

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