Here I am back from another period of apparent disappearance. As I mentioned (albeit briefly), I presented at Internet librarian 2007 in Monterey California back in late October. My talk, Extending your reach, E-Training for an Entire State!, went rather well. We had about 70 people attend, which is rather small, but those who attended seemed very interested. People asked lots of questions, and even kept Kathy Petlewski, my copresenter, and I after for about 45 minutes. Resources from this talk can be found here.

The following week, I presented at the Michigan Library Association Annual Conference. My talk, Bringing Second Life into your First Life, seemed to go pretty well as well. In contrast to IL, our audience of about 70 people filled the room completely, and was considered quite large. Resources from this talk can be found in the same place.

After those two whirlwind weeks, I found myself back in the office at MLC and was ecstatic to be there! I started working on a little project with Ruth, MLC’s Associate Director, making day trips around the state involving MLC. In case you haven’t heard, MLC is starting a Michigan Evergreen project, Partnering with the Grand Rapids Public Library. It was announced on Thursday, that I am to be the Systems Librarian for the project starting on Monday! Yay!!!

In the midst of my excitement, I got a little cold, missed 2 days of work, and discovered I had pneumonia, blech. I’m feeling much better today, nearly like a human being.

My foster dog, Lester, found a really good home. Harry seems to have a lead at a new home, and yesterday, in the midst of feeling awful, I got a new foster dog, Adam. He’s very sweet, but really confused and scared about how he ended up at my house, poor boy.

I start teaching for Wayne State University in January, the same class at last summer, and am teaching a different class in the fall. Good fun.

Anyway, that’s all for now. If I keep this up, I’ll be back around… tax day or something.

Jenny Levine-Gaming

Wednesday

• 90 mil next gen (millennial) kids
• Pew study, every college kid had played a video game
• Incoming college freshmen, good chance they would play 10,000 hours of video games
• Average age of gamer:  33
• Older people are getting into wii, it’s motion censored, not controlled by fingers
• Groups come together around games, retirement homes, different generations, families, peoples with disabilities
• Gamers excel at
• Willing to experiment
• Good at prioritizing
• Inherent distress of bosses (boss is the name of the villain).  “boss” is a bad word
• Expect different paths to the right answer
• Where do we personally draw the line?  Are these educational
• Candy Land-colors, numbers, socialization
• Chess-strategizing
• Boggle, Scrabble
• Pokemon-text, comprehension, complex language
• NASA has a Pokemon card
• NY times crossword puzzle-educational
• Civilization-statistics, strategy
• DDR-physical education, pattern recognition, planning ahead
• WoW-lots of stuff to keep track of, strategizing, prioritizing, working together
• You can do tournament play
• Public libraries
• Academic libraries
• Libraries have created games for staff

• Cost
• Can have kids bring in equipment
• Nintendo DS-very educational games

Virtual Worlds

Second Life Libraries and the Alliance Info Archipelago

Lori Bell

• “That’s where people are and that’s where people are going to be.”
• Need to be in virtual worlds as a third presence (after the internet)
• One of the most important things is leadership support
• Online resources are two dimensional and text based. Virtual worlds are 3 dimensional
• Had live events and resources for banned books week
• Lori’s husband actually joined SL to spend more time w/her
• Husband abandoned it to play WoW with son and daughter
• Real World and Online virtual communities
• Online and virtual can be worldwide
• Active people and watchers
• A lot of people go into SL to create, be it books, clothing, events, etc.
• Over 10 million registered members
• It’s a world, there is culture, recreation, education
• Alliance Library System has hundreds of volunteers from around the world
• Whyville..?  just getting started.. kids 8-14
• Reasons for being there
• 24/7 services
• It’s fun
• Have over 600 members in the google groups
• Over 700 librarians in world
• Reference group answers over 200 answers per week
• There are competitors
• Parternships
• HealthInfo Island, Renaissance Island, book discussions, training, collection development, collaborating, tons
• Exhibit space
• Lori is talking way too fast, but she has SO much to cover and so little time
• There are challenges, to be covered later

Shawn McCann

Did You Say Gaming Librarian?

• Immersive Learning (Gaming) Librarian at McMaster University
• He sits in his office and plays games.. hehehehe
• He really does everything.. instruction, reference, etc.
• He explore games and virtual worlds and how they are using be used in education
• Libraries were reactive, now we’re reactive
• Games and virtual worlds are important in higher educations.  Researchers are studying social, cultural and physical effects of gaming
• Spread across sciences, social sciences, humanities, etc.
• Important to students.. over 70% of people in US play games
• 44% are between 18-49
• How do we go about supporting that?
• Stick to your guns.. hmmm
• Console games = xbox, Nintendo, etc.
• You can support virtual worlds and games through services, like doing reference.   They can do instruction and have meetings
• They can offer classes on how to use SL
• You can support them through your spaces.  He wants a gaming lab.
• McMaster purchased and island in SL, and are waiting for it to arrive.

Jeremy Kemp  SJSU

• Assistant director of the SL campus.   Offers a full graduate level course, full credit
• He played a really really cool video… of a reporter interviewing a class in SL

Building Communities in Second Life

• Is SL really it’s own community or do you need some other things?
• We’ve gone from text based world to three dimensional worlds
• Now, fully graphical and has voice.
• There are over 50 virtual worlds  some for kids, some for adults, some are game-based, some are more living online
• They are meant to be done socially.. you and a community.
• Virtual worlds can be very serious, but can also be very fun
• Guiding principles for online communities
• You need software that promotes good discussion
• You need to be able to share information
• You need discussions that can be any length and that can include pointers to other information.. though it a bit harder to transfer information that is online.
• Conversations need to be kept for future reference.
• The community needs to be able to set its own rules
• There needs to be institutional memory
• Needs to promote safely and confidentiality
• Needs the ability to handle crisis
• You can’t rely solely on SL, on the environment; you have to rely on other things to expand…
• Great place to find and interact, but you need to use other tools like IM, email, facebook, Ning, etc.
• You need to think of other tools to help build that community
• Do demos for staff, show them videos, etc.
• Understand and support the communities that are already there

Trends

·        Take clues from gamers. Gamers are doing “SL w/a purpose”

·        Develop more capabilities

·        Lessen the learning curve

·        Lighter-weight” virtual world

·        Crossworld interaction.  The ability to go from one to the other

JJ Drinkwater

Virtual Neighborhood, Real Community

• She runs a library on Caledon, a nation state
• Partly historical 19^th century
• Her library serves the community by being a place where one can learn about the 19^th century imagination
• People form communities based on interests
• How do we serve those communities?
• How do we integrate library services into virtual communities?
• SL serves as a third place.. the local pub, the café, wherever you go that’s not your home or your work.
• It’s not just having a library that matters, it’s having a librarian, someone to talk to, makes the experience richer, and makes them big fans of the library
• “Library as a social node’
• Steampunk vs. cyberpunk
• For many, their role play life is their whole other life…
• Don’t make distinctions in RL, answer in terms of the virtual world that you are participating in
• Role play is an occasion and an opportunity to do research.

Sara Houghtman Jan and Aaron Schmidt

Marketing

Where should you market your website?

Search engine findability

• Search for variations of your library’s name
• Ensure you site is accurately at the top
• Minor or metasearch engines
• Buy AdWorks from Google
• Search engine optimization (SEO)

Library directory listings

Blog search engines

• Feed submitter submits your blog’s feed to 16 sites at once
• Technoranti
• Robin good’s list of where to submit your blog and feed
• RSS Specifications list of where to submit your feed

Sweet wikipedia goodness

·        List your library on the appropriate town, country or school’s entry

Wikimapia

·        Add location for your library and other community features of interest

Community website presence

·        Eventful

Blogs and forums

·        Local blogs

·        Technology boards

·        Metroblogging

·        Feedmap

·        Blogs by citty

·        Blogdigger local

Interact with local blogs

• Don’t intrude, but be available
• Find appropriate blogs
• It takes a while to get into the blogs

Presence where it’s warranted

• Ensure yoru library has a presence on local websites
• Are you linked anywhere?

In google, there’s syntax.  Link:yourlibrary’saddres to see who’s linking to your blog

Social review websites

• Yelp
• Citysearch
• Judy’s book
• Insiderpages
• Local2me

Social networking sites

• Create a profile for your library
• Major options:  myspace, facebook, flickr, ning
• libsuccess list

IM

• You should be communicating w/people via IM and text messaging

Make a/v content findable

Twitter