Librarian in Black Blog – Sarah Houghton

IL2007: Virtual Worlds & Libraries
Presenters: Lori Bell and Shawn McCann and Jeremy Kemp

This session started with a discussion from Lori Bell about the importance of administrative leadership and support for involvement in Second Life.  She defined traditional online resources in libraries as being two-dimensional and text-based while virtual worlds are extremely vibrant, multi-dimensional, and multimedia.  She mentioned ALA’s Banned Books Week presence in Second Life, complete with a pirate ship where people who wanted to ban a book had to walk the plank.  Lori listed two types of virtual worlds: MUVEs (Multi-User Virtual Environments) and MMORPGs (Massively Multiplayer Online Role Playing Games).   She compared real-world and virtual communities.  Second Life is being used to facilitate meetings and education, has nearly 10 million registered avatars, and has an off-shoot–Teen Second Life.  She listed many reasons that libraries should be involved in Second Life.  The Library presence in Second Life has grown rapidly sent the group rented a shop space in April of 2006.  Many people come into the Information Island Archipelago to get answers to questions while they are in Second Life, both SL-related questions and other real-world questions.  SL allows for community partnerships, opportunities to work with groups and organizations you might not get to work with in the real world.  There are many spaces within Second Life in which people can gather information, meet friends, and enjoy each other. 

The second presenter was Shawn McCann.  He works for the McMaster University as their Immersive Learning Librarian.  He  explores games and virtual worlds and their intersection with higher education, comes up with ways for the library to support games and virtual worlds to their students, and also does "normal library duties" like instruction.  He noted that many libraries right now are reactive to the entire gaming environment, and we should be proactive (SARAH’S NOTE: THIS COULD BE SAID ABOUT MOST TECHNOLOGY ISSUES IN LIBRARIES).  There is a lot of literature about gaming, the benefits of gaming, the effects of gaming on health, etc.  72% of Americans play computer and/or video games of one type or another.  We can support gaming in libraries through collections, library services, and spaces.  Libraries can offer circulating game collections, circulating consoles, reference services in virtual worlds, instruction about virtual worlds, support student collaboration in virtual worlds, and offer gaming equipment and labs for students to use.  The Library of Congress funded a game preservation project to archive games of all sorts that appear in a digital format.

Jeremy Kemp’s presentation was about the Second Life implementation at the San Jose State University SLIS.  He discussed the student-instructor interactions, how students use SL as a learning tool, and why it has been an important project for the library school.  I also saw him present at the Future of Libraries Conference in September, though, so you can look back at that post as well to get more of a sense of what the San Jose School of Library and Information Science is doing with Second Life.  They have a virtual campus, classes in SL, advisor meetings in SL.  How cool!

IL2007