Actually a rough draft

Rough draft:

1.Presumptions - you know what SL is. You have some idea of what librarians are doing there.

Basic idea = Librarians are good at managing information in physical spaces. We are good at managing information online. Librarianship in an online virtual world brings these skills together in a new way.

1. What do librarians do?

2 What is Second Life ?

1.2 What librarians are doing there

3. Australian Libraries building

How it came about

What it has in it

4. Some space/ information management challenges within second life.

5. New skills we need

6. Advantages to librarians of being in Second Life

So..... We have skills that make us useful in an online virtual world. Some of the challenges of building a SL library have been x , y, z. Librarians need to learn x, y z ..but as they do they have great fun along the way.

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20 Aug 2007

Library clients in Second Life found it hard to get into the Australian Libraries Building, so I removed all the walls. It doesn't rain, no one is going to break into the building, walking avatars just bump into walls and they annoy flying avatars. The building didn't look like a library any more and it jarred me out of an immersive experience - so I immediately put half the walls back on again. From this, I learned that Second Life Librarianship is still very firmly rooted in re-creating some of the experience that clients get in Real Life.

I will outline the evolution of the Australian Libraries Building on Cybrary City within the multi-user virtual environment, Second Life.  I will describe how this fits in the evolution of the Information Archipelago.  I am going to use these case studies to outline the similarities and differences between virtual world and real world librarianship. I will pay particular attention to the built environment, management, communication and collaboration

SECOND LIFE LIBRARIES

Librarianship in Second Life requires many of the same skills as in Real Life.

After hundreds of years locating information within built space, we are experts at this. After twenty or so years of creating online information environments, we are rather skilled at this too. Second Life is a space where these two skills meld.