Saturday, February 3, 2007

WEEK 5: SecondLife's InfoIsland

CLA PR Roundtable members got an e-mail invitation for a tour of Second Life and the librarian hangout, InfoIsland. A tour was scheduled for Saturday from 11am-noon, so after visiting the YMCA for some much-needed exercise, I retrieved my Second Life name (CyberLibrarian Wrangler) from a file that I had created months ago when first exploring the site. Back then, I read about Second Life, but this time I downloaded the software.
Thanks to the time it took me to dig out my earlier information, download the software, and clean my daughter's bathroom, I missed the tour by UCDavis Instructional Librarian, Bernadette. So, I toured on my own, learned to move (jump, forward/back, sideways, and sit.) A handful of other avatars were exploring InfoIsland, but we didn't introduce ourselves or chat/IM -- next time, maybe. Most likely, they were other librarians.

I had about half an hour or so to tour before getting bumped from my home computer. Here are the locations I visited: SirsiDynix auditorium, OCLC search central, and SecondLifeLibrary by Alliance. I saw but didn't visit Tech Soup. I'm ready for a tour by a fellow librarian.

Oh, yes... I also added the InfoIsland.org blog to my feeds.
The next day, I toured some more, took a snapshot (see above), and sent myself a postcard photo from the SecondLife Library's Business Reference on floor three.

The following evening, I toured and experimented with chatting. So much is so new on Second Life. It feels like the early days of the Internet (remember before browsers?)

2 comments:

HVX Silverstar said...

Hi there, we will meet this week with a few others who have expressed interest in a tour of the growing Information Archipelago: from one island to 8 in less than a year. There are a lot of opportunities for librarians to volunteer with the ever-expanding programs. HVX Silverstar
We will be opening the Infoisland Machinima Library on the Arts island and will be offering classes for continuing education for anyone interested in pursuing new media, machinima, for instruction, outreach and marketing.
http://machinimalibrarians.blogspot.com
http://infoisland.org
http://avatarlibrarians.blogspot.com

HVX Silverstar said...

Search on the groups in Second Life to find the library groups.
SL Machinima Librarians blog
Infoisland.org
Academic Avatar Librarians blog