Second Life

I've decided to participate in editing a library for Cybrary City. I'm waiting to see if I get the go ahead to include the Stanford name on the project. If not, I'll probably create an Engineering Library Consoritum or perhaps we should create a digital scrapple library.... :)

Anyway, here is my avatar looking at a poster from an education poster session. Some other groupst that have buildings: OCLC, UNC Chapel Hill, Michigan Libraries Consoritum, IBM. Many more to come. It will be interesting to see what applications are developed.

Last night, I visited OCLC's interactive search engine. You talk to it on a special channel and you can pull up search results in another Internet window. There is also a central reference desk and various exhibits being developed by librarians. I looked at one about cats in mysteries. There is also a big medical library where you can search PubMed and do a lot of other things. I didn't stay there too long since I was a little overwhelmed by it.

One idea I had was to have virtual office hours in SL. It's almost impossible to get offices in departments. You can also include links on web pages to teleport users to your location. The hurdle would be assuming that a user had a computer adequate enough to run Second Life. I had to upgrade my home computer clunker to be able to run it...although I was able to get a really good deal on an HP 1610, which is very quick and can run SL.

Anybody want to meet me there sometime? Let me know. My building currently only has a glass table and perhaps a renegade planet. I managed to recapture most of a solar system script I ran, but couldn't catch Mercury (to darn quick).