second-life

Here’s some super slides.

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I’ve just spent the last month or so making slides for my talk at the National Library about Second Life Libraries next Tuesday.

JESSAMYN WEST’S HTML
I try not to use proprietary software if possible, so at first I thought I’d use Jessamyn West’s HTML slide method, which is simple and elegant and very lightweight. They allow you to add notes and to select a “print” version for printing.

JO KAY’S PRETTY SECOND LIFE SLIDES
But then, I saw Jo Kay’s slides which she uses when she talks about Second Life and Australian educators. I just had to have me some of ’em – so, with Jo’s blessing, I stole the idea and made my first ever PowerPoint slides. Jo has taken snapshots in Second Life and used them as the background to her dot points…very pretty and shows the environment of Second Life comprehensively.

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KEVIN YANK’S SCREENCAST
Another set of slides which caught my eye this week are Kevin Yank’s slides from a talk he did for VALA libraryfolk in Melbourne in November 2006 about Recognising Web 2.0. He’s made a screencast using the live audio (including audience responses) from his talk as the soundtrack to the relevant slides. There is a captioned version, which somehow made his points clearer still. It would have been nice if the questions from the floor were audible as well as the answers – but it’s a small quibble.

STEPHEN ABRAMS AND CUTE KITTENS
I also like Stephen Abram’s slides, like the 124 he made for this talk, The Social Library2.0, before the SLA New York Chapter on 10 January 2007. Who wouldn’t at least be interested by someone who started a talk with a picture of a gun pointing at a kitten? (Yay! this is the third post I get to tag “kittens”).

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THE LESSIG METHOD
My favourite, favourite slides of all are from copyright guru Lawrence Lessig. He uses aroung 250 slides each talk, many of them with a single white word in typewriter font on a black background. His timing and recall is perfect, so he will have a single word emphasising the key point of a sentence as he utters it. Here is an example, a talk about Free Culture at OSCON in 2002. People now write about the “Lessig Method” of making slides.

SLIDESHARE.NET
Another slidey sort of discovery recently is slideshare.net. It’s like Flickr or YouTube, but for slides. Watch out for my Flying Librarians of Oz slides appearing there mid-February, under the username sirexkat.

No-one knows you are a dog…or a library…

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Back in 1993, after Peter Steiner’s “on the internet no-one knows you’re a dog” cartoon was published in The New Yorker (pg 61 of July 5, 1993), everyone seemed to have it up on their wall. I remember falling over myself laughing at it, because we were all coming to terms with online identities and their general slipperiness.

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Recently there have been lots of discussion of libraries who set up their own MySpace account. For example, here, here, here and here. The recipe seems to be: “Go to where your users are (MySpace), get an account, add some information, and maybe a catalogue search box, get some friends and voila! an extra service point”. I wonder whether this is only an American trend, as I don’t know of any Australian libraries doing it…. although the Second Life Libraries have.

I know it is touted as A Good Thing, but my gut feeling when I see it is

“Nooooo it’s just for people…making real social contact, however banal…..leave them alone and don’t stick your nose in”.

The fine line between marketing and social contact is so very jumbled today, that I know it’s a naive response. Some corporations do try to find a way into online social space to market their wares, but I believe that most libraries are there because they want to be part of the conversation and to offer users better service.

In our physical spaces, social contact is definitely one of our roles – chatting with staff behind the counter as you check your books out each week is a very important part of many people’s lives. Even when we offer self-checkout stations, people will pop over to the counter after checking the books to say hello.

But last night, something occured to me that I find even more disturbing. What if avatars in Second Life stop only representing people? Already some individuals have an “alt”, or alter avatar. I suspect some SL librarians have their “professional self” avatar..and then the naughty one who rushes around buying expensive strap on appendages for a different kind of SL experience. This is a “one person/many identities” setup.

How about the “many people/one identity arrangement? What if a library set itslef up as an avatar? Let’s call her “Ima Library”. Instead of going to a building to a reference service point, you could just IM Ima. Ima could come along to distance learning classes and teach information literacy. Same principle as libraries in MySpace, but one which somehow messes more with my mind.

And then..what if a blog took on an avatar. What if LibrariansMatter DingDong offered you friendship? How about NewModelHonda Esperanz , would you chat with her? Would you feel that a cynical marketing ploy was being pulled on you?

Back in the good old days of 1993, people were just people and libraries were just libraries and we all knew who was who…except, of course, those of us who were dogs.

SL mirrors RL mirrors SL mirrors….

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I’m after a new look for my Second Life avatar. She’s going to be showing a few folks around, so I want her to look good. In Second Life, I can buy an entire new face, body shape, skin and hair. It means I’ve given the Linden Labs my credit card number, so I’m cashed up with Linden dollars for the first time. As Mr9 would say, “the money’s burning a hole in my head”.

My first purchase was a too-dark skin, with a face that reminds me of a vapid cow. Seemed OK when I tried it on in the shop.

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With a location search on “skin”, I can get to the Centrefold shop and the Hot ‘n’ Sexy shop. I asked someone where I’d find the “attractive and intelligent and interesting shop”…but strangely, he didn’t know. I bet that if I opened a branch of that near Info Island, I’d do a roaring trade to librarians.

In Second Life, most people are young, attractive and can fly. I thought I’d never see that in Real Life. But, today I took the kids to see “Aureo”, a very stylish and sophisticatedly lit performance by aerealists from Western Australia’s electronic circus company Skadada. They were breathtaking and reminded me that with determination and practice, people can do wonders.

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To a kid with a hammer everything looks like a nail, but today wasn’t the only time Second Life has spilled into Real Life. Thursdays are Laughter Yoga days. We spend an hour trying to laugh as much as possible to coax our bodies to release endorphins. Last week we did an exercise where you pretend your boss has just given you an impossible job, due in half an hour. We look up from our typing and laugh uproariously and say “you want it when??”.

So, there I was, in a circle of people walking around with all of us typing on our imaginary keyboards in front of us. This is the exact position your Second Life avatar takes when you are typing in the chat window, so the yoga exercise wasn’t the only reason I was staring at the others and LMAO.

Getting Ready For Canberra

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If our kids tell you that they’ve been fed nothing but baked beans for too many dinners in the next few months…I’m afraid they’ll be telling the truth.

Their parents are preoccupied with the serious business of Getting Ready For Canberra.

The Co-Pilot flies over at Easter because his Fremantle-based choir, Voicemale, will be performing at the National Folk Festival. Their set is around the theme “A New Agenda”. They are thinking of their all-male blokey group singing “Sisters are Doing it for Themselves“. As I write this, there is the “thump, thump,thump” of someone keeping time upstairs as he arranges “Brass in Pocket“. So lots of singing and practice and co-ordination for him until April.

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Me..well, I’m busy making movies and taking snapshots in Second Life. I’ll be in Canberra for something else in early February. To calm my nerves and kill some time, I emailed Matthew Stuckings at the National Library to ask whether I could meet someone to chat about what we’ve been doing with the Australian Libraries Building in Second Life.

Well…they were interested, and now I’ll be giving a public talk about Second Life as part of their “Digital Culture” series, on Wednesday February 14th 12:30pm – 1:30pm in the Library Theatre.

If it was on any other topic, I’d be really daunted. I was daunted..but I decided to do it partly because it’s a really invigorating topic for me…and I know enough about it to talk for an hour (half an hour plus questions!)..and I’d love to see people’s faces as they experience SL for the first time. And… an hour after it was suggested to me, I read Ivan Chew’s post about “chickening out” of being on blogTV.SG.

In my talk, I’ll be pointing out that Second Life provides new chances to collaborate. It’s been illustrated by the four or five generous Second Life Librarians who have shared with me their power point slides they used for live presentations. If anyone reading this has any ideas of what I should include or what they think people would want to know, feel free to contact me.

I’m doing a practice run at MPOW on February 9th for WA academic librarians. I hope to do a live demo for both talks, but am getting together lots of movies and snapshots as backup for both. (Hence my new toy).

The talk is titled “Flying Librarians of Oz: What’s all the fuss about Second Life and what’s it got to do with libraries?“. More info on the NLA Events page. (Now, if I’ve used Cite Bite properly, that link should go to the page, then magically jump down to a yellow highlighted heading, “Digital Culture Talk.)

TODAY’S HIPPIE CARD: Content

Data as a social space.

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A change is happening in how we relate to our documents and data. We’re moving toward using them as social spaces.

At conferences, where the presentations and papers (the “data”) are the ostensible reason for people to be there, I’ve always found the informal exchange (the “social”) much more fun and beneficial. This is now happening online. Here’s some examples of what I mean…

1. Adding a “meebo me” widget to your library home page. Users don’t have to leave the site to connect with a librarian.

2. A “discuss” function in google docs. Ryan, the Other Librarian, and I have been sharing a couple of google docs while we work on a library related something. Last night I noticed the “discuss” tab on a shared spreadsheet and emailed him so we could test it out. While “in” the document, we were chatting, and uploading and amending the document. We could have opened another document and continued our chat there. He’s in Canada, and – while I can pretend to be a jaded, 2.0 kind of gal, used to the way the net has shrunk the world – I still found it novel and it gave me a buzz.

3. A couple of weeks ago I blogged on VLINT about visiting the Michigan Library Consortium’s library in Second Life and climbing all over a 3D graph they had, representing library membership.

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4. Distance learning in Second Life. I can imagine a building set up with all the resources needed for a class…links to external sites and cached documents..video presentations available on a player. The difference between that and a tradtional web site is that students can send their avs. to that “place” and see who else is there. While accessing the info, they can discuss their experience of the course and are more likely to ask each other for help once they have made that casual contact. More like the intangible social and academic benefits gained by going to lectures or tutes on campus.

TODAY’S HIPPIE CARD: Up until now

Power of one….

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People with enthusiasm, who embrace what they do with joy and encourage others, can change the lives of hundreds of people…far more than most committees do. Here’s a few of them…

Fig 1. Enthuse, embrace, learn, play.


Enthuser 1 – LORI BELL
Lori always seems to be online when I visit Second Life. She was showing librarians around Info Island 10am Western Australian time this morning, yet when I just emailed her (about 9pm my time), she replied straight away. She’s getting out of bed at 3am her time to show us around as part of our LINTy party.

She is co-ordinating countless projects in Second Life, creates a Real Life buzz around her project and is a hub around which many folk are empowered to try out skills in Second Life. She’s part of a team but she works many extra hours and brings extra ooomph to it.

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Enthuser 2 – WARREN HORTON
Director General of the National Library of Australia, 1985 – 1999. I’ve been doing a bit of reading about Aurora and discovered that the foundation is self funded due to a legacy he left on his death in 2003. He believed in empowering future librarians, and was deeply involved in Aurora’s inception and running until he died.

I’ve been reading how he scrutinized the applications and took delight in matching applicants with mentors. He was affectionately called the “Grand Poo-bah” by participants and mentors when he joined in each 5 day live-in course. He let down his guard and talked frankly about some of his best and worst decisions. He had an extensive knowledge of who was where in the library world, and apparently a talent for suggesting who should be where.


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Enthuser 3 – RICHARD RENNIE
Richard runs the Fremantle Light and Sound Museum. He’s not a librarian, but a passionate ex-science teacher who won the Premier’s Award for Science Communication 2006, He single-handedly runs his collection as a volunteer, in a small room in our local museum..and always seems to be there when we visit. He lets us play with his stuff collected over 40 years, talks to us about it and we leave thinking about it for days afterward.

The last few times we visited, we

  • Played “Pong” on an old tele-tennis machine hooked up to a portable black and white TV
  • Ran our fingers along a string dangling from a christmas card and heard it play a tune due to the friction of our fingers over the special bumps in the string
  • Used a magnet to distort the picture on an old black and white TV set
  • Wore special red and blue specs and goggled at Michael Jackson and Dr Who in 3D
  • Placed our $50 notes under ultraviolet light to reveal the anticounterfeiting marks on it
  • Used a typewriter – a highight for Mr4 who now wants to get one.
  • Debated whether the baffles on a gramaphone really made the sound quality better
  • Looked through periscopes and kaleidoscopes and stroboscopes.


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Enthuser 4 – REG BOLTON
I’ve previously blogged about Reg Bolton. He packed an entire circus into his suitcase and inspired and taught thousands of children that they had the power to amaze. He had a few “circus swear words” that he banned from his Big Top

“No, Can’t, Impossible, Embarrasing, Difficult”


TODAY’S HIPPIE CARD: Face the situation.

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Party in Second Life for Australian Libraries

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Here’s our official notice about the Christmas party LINT is holding for Australian Libraries in Second Life.

By the way, congratulations to fellow-linter, Michelle McClean who has been award a Ramsay and Reid scholarship to spend 3 weeks travelling the US looking at Library 2.0 technologies in public libraries. Imagine getting to visit with John Blyberg and then checking out the Imaginon in Charlotte.

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Virtual end of year party for Australian Libraries in Second Life.

The Australian libraries blog, librariesinteract.info, is hosting an end-of year party in Second Life on 13th December, 6pm to 8pm Western Australian time. [This is 1am San Francisco time; San Francisco time also being Second Life time.]

Second Life is a virtual world, with a population of over 1 million, in which large companies, schools and universities (IBM, Dell, Harvard) have set up shop. Reuters newsagency has its own correspondent there. According to a September 2006 Popular Science article, Second Life, through currency trading, shopping and land sales, has a GDP of $64 Million. Recently, Australian Libraries were given a free building for a year on Cybrary City, courtesy of Talis and the Alliance Library System in return for 2 hours per week work on library services for SL residents.

The party will include a tour of Info Island and Info Island II by Lori Bell from Alliance Library Systems. We will follow the yellow brick road from the Oz library to the Kansas State Library Virtual Branch next door. Then, back to our building to hang out… dance on the dance floor, snare some cyber snacks, and go easy on the virtual alcoholic beverages.

You can join in virtually from your own PC, or come and look over our shoulders in real life. If you join in virtually, it would be a good idea to check out Second Life before the event:

1. Go to the Second Life website.
2. Check the systems requirements.
3. Go to the join up page and choose one of the family names offered..and make up your first name.
4. You will be asked for your credit card details, but do not have to give them.
5. Download the Second Life client to your PC.
6. Choose how you’d like your avatar (representation in SL) to look.
7. Enter…explore.
8. Teleport to just outside our building at: 207, 68, 23. (Often passersby can help you out to do this) Alternatively, we can teleport you to our building, if you send a message.

For further details, please contact Con Wiebrands (flexnib at gmail dot com) or Kathryn Greenhill (sirexkat at gmail dot com). If you are already exploring Second Life and would like to meet up, our SL names are Paradoxa Kurrajong (Con) and Emerald Dumont (Kathryn) – feel free to IM us!

Hope to see you on Info Island!

Kathryn and Con

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Everything’s up to date in Cybrary City!

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Wooo and hoo! Talis and Alliance Library System have just announced the construction of a new island in Second Life – Cybrary City. Read more about Cybrary City here.

It will have resources for librarians, plus provide space for real life libraries to have a SL prescence. No mention of the word “free”, but here’s hoping.

Rochelle and CW have recently written about their first experiences in Second Life. Mine was similar when there wasn’t an event on, but I had a great time at the Grand Opening of Info Island – watching Lorelei Junot behead herself with a guillotine at the spooky costume party and sitting in the cinema watching Rocky Horror Picture Show with other Library Friends. Oh yes, I also enjoyed the learning in the auditorium.

Image: Home not so sweet. Not sure about the pink hippo either.

The Linden gods of Second Life have played dice with my avatar, poor Emerald Dumont (green hill – geddit?) by making her home inside a small model of a volcano in Mahulu. Everytime I teleport home, I end up in the volcano, thrashing about in fire and have to ask passerbys to teleport me out. At least I’m not like John Blyberg, who in SL had a grand piano stuck on his head for a while.

I’m beginning to think of SL not as a game or a virtual world, but as a user interface, similar to a web browser. A successful game would be interesting all the time. A successful virtual world would feel “real” all of the time.

A user interface can be friendly or unfriendly, but if it works well, then your focus should be on what you used it for, rather than the interface itself. If you browse the web with Firefox and what you find is boring, offensive, or unsatisfying, you don’t walk away disenchanted with Firefox.

In academic libraries, we will soon have huge numbers of undergraduates who are used to this type of interface from gaming. They love it and understand it. To deliver the services where they are, we should understand it – and maybe learn to love it – pink hippos and all.

TODAY’S HIPPIE CARD: Move away

( I never, ever cheat with these cards, just draw ’em as they come, but they keep being pertinent to my posts!)

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