Rochelle at Tinfoil + Raccoon’s written about her recent visit to the Second Life world. Looks like she was there when I was!
She raises a lot of issues about the whole experience of SL for a newbie and the idea of having a library in the SL world, and the post has generated some almost heated comments.
I hadn’t thought much about it before, but there are so many parallels between visiting a virtual world for the first time and visiting a library as someone who is completely unfamiliar with the “interface” and unsure what one can expect. Rochelle: “For me, my first visit to SL was too much like a visit to a real library might be for most users–too hard to use.”
All the questions of relevance to users are replicated in SL, too, as they are in RL. I think that all libraries are currently facing the question of relevance - how do we stay relevant to our users, and more importantly, how do we stay relevant? I was thinking about this after reading Rochelle’s post, and then I read David Weinberger’s blog and his comment on librarianship as a viable profession for the future:
“…there will be a big demand for people who can help us find, understand and reuse information (or, as I like to think of it, create an infrastructure of meaning). We’re going to need lots of help thinking through systems that will enable multiple orders to emerge from the behaviors of distributed groups. Something like that.”
(I’m glad that some people have such positive views of my profession!)
After reading David Weinberger, I then pondered Meredith’s post on how difficult it is for students (and not just students, I suspect!) to verify the validity and veracity of information they find online. Yesterday I had the case of the student whose references for his/her PhD candidacy were almost 100% from Wikipedia. Obviously we’re not reaching everyone we should be reaching…
What role can RL libraries play for our users in the 21st century? I don’t think there’s any other profession that is better placed to play this information navigator/broker role but we need to make sure we’re keeping up with all the changes in the online world. And not just keeping up - how do we lead and push things in the directions we want them to go?
Hmm… I didn’t mean for this post to turn into a running commentary on What CW’s Been Reading in the Blogosphere. (Or should that be CW’s Messy Mind.)
*”in a mess”
