Virtual Libraries month in Second Life

April 15 to May 15 is Virtual Libraries Month in the virtual world, Second Life. There are two key sites in SL
1)Information on Community Virtual Library activities (a Second Life international "ask a librarian" service and more e.g. they mount exhibitions and events)
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Info%20Island/83/55/35

2)A sampling of other libraries in Second Life (this is an Italianate garden with posters with links to a sample of Second Life libraries)
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Info%20Island/64/118/33
To go to these locations you need a Second Life avatar and the SL browser on your computer.

Virtual things

Virtualenquiry is "the website for the UK Virtual Enquiry project. We're looking at how instant messaging software is being used in today's University and College Libraries as a support and communication tool" They are funded by SLIC (Scottish Libraries and Information Council) and partnered by Carnegie College and Napier University. The site is newish and at the moment they have a survey about virtual enquiries that they'd like people to complete. http://www.virtualenquiry.net/

Continuing the virtual theme, the Second Life (SL) Educators conference is taking place in Tampa this week. I'm giving a paper Using first and second life to develop inquiry skills in the freshman year at a UK university: a happy blend? - but in the virtual parallel conference being held in Second Life itself. At the main conference there are a couple of papers about librarians experiences/role in SL. The conference wiki is at http://sledcc.wikispaces.com/ and there are likely to be full papers up in due course.

Web 2.0 papers from the World Library and Information Conference

I was trawling through the programme of the World Library and Information Congress (WLIC) for information literacy papers for my infolit blog (see my blog post at http://information-literacy.blogspot.com/2008/07
/infolit-papers-at-world-library-and.html for those links) and came across some Web 2.0 items of interest. WLIC presenters provide full text papers which are mounted on the IFLA website, often in more than one language. This has built up to a valuable resource, as this is the most international of library conferences. The 2008 papers are all linked from one very long "Programme" page http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla74/Programme2008.htm and although the conference is next month many papers are already there, including these ones.

Using web 2.0 in the Australian parliaments: the dream and reality, by Roxanne Missingham, Parliamentary Librarian, Australian Parliamentary Library
http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla74/papers/103-Missingham-en.pdf

One of a number of papers about using virtual worlds for reference services is:
Gimmick or groundbreaking? Canadian academic libraries using chat reference in multi-user virtual environments by Amy Buckland and Krista Godfrey (McMaster University Library, Hamilton, Canada) http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla74/papers/158-Buckland_Godfrey-en.pdf

Also there are a number of papers in the Continuing Professional Development and Workplace Learning session "Emerging technologies in libraries – continuing professional development and workplace learning implications and applications" , namely:

Using web 2.0 technologies to develop a sense of community for emerging LIS Professoinals by Bob Glass (Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, UK)
http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla74/papers/150-Glass-en.pdf

Platforms for real-time collaborative learning for practising librarians: using blogs, wikis and e-mailing by Wun Han Chow (National Library of Singapore, Singapore) http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla74/papers/150-Han-en.pdf

Developing new skills and expertise to support digital scholarship and scholarly communication by Brian Rosenblum (University Kansas, Lawrence, USA)
http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla74/papers/150-Rosenblum-en.pdf

MySpace Study

Results from a study by Mike Thelwall of the School of Computing and Information Technology at the University of Wolverhampton (UK), entitled "Social Networks, Gender and Friending: an analysis of MySpace Member Profiles" were published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology June 2008.

With two small samples of 15,043 and 7,627 member profiles, Thelwall was able to extract data to give a representative idea of the makeup of MySpace users. To summarise, Thelwall found that:

• the median representative age is 21 (only representative because it is based on what the profiles say their age is)
• women tend to be looking for friendship, men for dating
• females and younger users have more MySpace friends
• approximately 60% of MySpace accounts are inactive
• many users only had the obligatory Tom as their friend

This study gives an insight into our users, both actual and potential and for those libraries who opt to inhabit MySpace, gives useful information to help best focus their virtual services.

Michelle