Author: rdlankes

I just got back from an all day retreat on the future, technology and libraries sponsored by ALA’s Office for Information Technology Policy. Lots of good people sharing ideas. Also I had the distinct pleasure of meeting the Shifted Librarian herself, Jenny Levine. She is blogging about the event if you’d like to check it out http://www.theshiftedlibrarian.com/. I also think ALA might stream parts of it on the web.

It’s good news at a university when you get quoted in the press. I was quoted in Fox News (I’m going to let you decide whether that is good news or bad). The real problem was the quote used…it lacks a bit of context. The quote at http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,269685,00.html could well tick off some very good librarians that I have said, and will restate here, are doing some very good work in Second Life (take a look at my responses here http://blogs.ala.org/districtdispatch.php?title=ala_wo_lecture_in_second_life&more=1&c=1&tb=1&pb=1). So I wanted to add some context to the following quote:

R. David Lankes, an associate professor at Syracuse University’s School of Information Studies, sees virtual-world communication as no more than a novelty.

“I set up an office in ‘Second Life’ — and I was addicted for a whole week,” he says. “I taught a class in ‘Second Life,’ and at one point I realized we were just chatting. We could do that over IM.”

So here is the rest of the context that didn’t make it into the quote. As I have said with all technologies, we need to figure out when and where this technology is useful. For me, with my limited Second Life experience, I couldn’t do more than IM with wings. I look at what the Second Life Library Group and Information Archipelago are up to as pioneering work where they are working past my limitations to figure out the when’s where’s and why’s.

I also think Second Life is just getting started. It needs to better figure out how to incorporate large volumes of data. If you want to read a 100 page paper, Second Life doesn’t accommodate it well. If you want to create a 3D model based on 500,000 data points, Second Life is not there yet. That’s not to say it won’t, but it just isn’t there yet. I also think sometimes the environment is too slavish to the physical world thing. I want to build a building with a hundred thousand rooms. I want that building to literally rearrange it self dynamically when I enter it, so that the rooms I care about the most are closest to me. When you enter the building all the rooms should automatically reshuffle themselves to your interests.

Will these things be taken care of? Certainly. As bandwidth and computing power rise, and the ability to stream more media types at higher resolutions to the environment increase, Second Life will get better. It will get better because librarians are there finding and pushing the limits of the technology, and then helping to overcome these limits.

So there you go. I’m not a Second Lifer. Not because I dismiss the technology as a novelty, but because I haven’t found it’s true potential in what I do…yet. Since the time of this interview I have worked with ALA to give a lecture in Second Life that was very interesting. I really want to do more of them (if you have a Second Life “speaking” opportunity, let me know). In the meantime, I look forward to learning more about Second Life’s growing potential.

So please, I would ask that you not take this quote as a blanket dismissal of Second Life. I also apologize that I gave a quote that could be used against the kind of innovation librarianship so desperately needs.

The following press release not only shows what Scott Nicholson is up to (some very cool stuff), but how the concepts of participatory librarianship can extend beyond the online world.

Press Release

Exploring the Intersection of Gaming and Libraries

(Syracuse, NY)

The music pounds and the sweaty teenagers stomp their feet in rhythm while another pair swing their guitars in the air. No, this isn’t a rave; it’s the local library. Many libraries are integrating gaming into their offerings for users, targeting younger members of the community. Libraries are bringing in teenagers through gaming programs who haven’t visited since their parents brought them to story time, and many are being exposed to other library services in the process. Cleverly placed books and media on computers, games, and other related activities go home with the users.

One role of many libraries is to serve as a community center where people living in the same area can meet and enjoy activities together. Games, as the next new media, are quickly being integrated into library services as an offering for groups of users who may not frequent the library for other reasons. As with any phenomenon, scientists wish to understand more about this intersection of gaming and libraries.

In order to explore games in libraries, researchers from the Syracuse University School of Information Studies, the American Library Association and the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana are working together. As the project grows, Director Scott Nicholson hopes that it will attract other researchers: “The advantage to having a common place to gather, both physically and virtually, is that it allows us as a group of researchers to explore gaming in libraries more effectively than if we were all working individually. Our connection with the profession through the ALA will allow us to focus on the most important issues with the scholarly rigor that good science demands.”

Other researchers involved with the process are Ian MacInnes and R. David Lankes, both from the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University and David Dubin, from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana. These researchers are tackling early problems of the development of a classification structure for games and determining the public good served by the library providing gaming programs. George Needham, VP of Member Services at OCLC, has been speaking on gaming in libraries for several years and brings a perspective from the largest worldwide library cooperative to the project. In addition, Jenny Levine, from the American Library Association, has considerable experience with gaming in libraries and will be bridging the research with the practice of librarianship.

To extend their current work, the researchers are working to secure funding to build a research laboratory at the Information Institute of Syracuse, where they can replicate the gaming programs currently put on in libraries and explore new program ideas. The researchers wish to explore the effectiveness of different types of gaming activities – not only video games, but also physical face-to-face games like board and card games – with different socioeconomic and age groups. In addition, the laboratory will be portable so that results can be tested in local libraries. The results will be disseminated to libraries as a guide to selecting gaming activities for a particular demographic profile and program goal. Questions about this project can be directed to Scott Nicholson at srnichol@syr.edu.