ITTS Update » Virtual Membership

Update on ALA Island in Second Life

Donavan — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 19:52:48 +0000

Banned Books Week at the end of September featured an ambitious build of a permanent site for Banned Books and OIF programs and events. We also contracted and had a garden created in place of the skating pond and Storytelling area. Storytelling continues in this beautiful spot. All stats for the BBW programming show an increase over last year’s figures.

In October we had several programs, among them, a presentation by author Cynthia Leitich Smith on the main stage that was well received. (Image link Cynthia Zanzibar (SL name of Cynthia Letitia Smith) talks about writing for Young Adults)

We continue to ramp up activities despite lack of support from staff who have signed up in SL … few people attend our weekly meetings to orient and assist new avatars get acclimated. In the meantime, ALA members in SL are putting together programs and plans for increased support of Midwinter activities in SL to share what is happening in Denver with those who cannot attend save via SL. We will provide Twitter feeds from the Youth Media Awards, the Midwinter Twitter feed, and reports from various MW attendees who have volunteered to report on what they do in Denver. A full schedule is being developed, and meetings at MW will be focused on programming for Annual Conference in Chicago.

NLW on ALA Island in SL

Donavan — Wed, 21 May 2008 18:47:36 +0000

I have a lot of blog “homes” and this week, joining two more nings, it got even harder for me to choose one, but for now it’s here at the Association of Virtual Worlds ning.

Serving Virtual Members

Donavan — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 15:27:17 +0000

Over the years, so much has been said, written, blogged, twittered, ad nauseum about virtual members of committees, discussion groups, etc. With our participation in Second Life, ALA is making good on all the lip service by creating a virtual campus that can provide a multitude of the kinds of information and interaction that can serve a wider range of our membership who do not go to conferences and partake of the continuing education opportunities offered.

Since November, ALA has owned an island on Second Life, a virtual world where a wide variety of Web resources can be shared and explored as well as facilitating social interaction. With the assistance of San Jose State University graduate students, we have created an open-air space where we can have meetings of various size and technical sophistication as well as instruments for providing information about all of our operational units. As the Island Manager, I have been informally charged with making the island work and what I hope we will develop over the next six months as a venue for virtual membership in ALA events and conferences. Christina Coleman, Member Specialist for the Membership Office, has a similar charge and has really taken charge of organizing staff to plan our first event: National Library Week on SL.

The advantage of using SL as a platform for virtual membership is that the same electronic resources that other virtual conference applications provide are available along with the actual presence of other virtual members. Just as at a conference, people can talk in the hallways and network, virtual members in SL can talk with each and network. In fact, the way people can create profiles for their avatars, you know much more about someone than you ever would in a first-time face-to-face situation.

A core group of staff, including Valerie Hawkins from ALA Library, will be available in the sixth floor training room on a weekly basis on Thursdays from noon to one. (Members, of course, can log in from wherever they are and join us inworld: IM Oberon Octagon, Kay Tairov, or ALALibraryVal Miles .) We hope people will take advantage of these training/orientation opportunities to improve SL skills and then practice them in the way the rest of us learned how: by exploring the variety of “worlds” that exist in SL as well as by working on ALA Island.

When I presented what we are doing in Second Life at the Association Forum’s Holiday Showcase, many attendees commented that ALA always seems to be at the cutting edge of technology. Please help us continue to push the envelope.