ALA Marginalia

My name is Valerie Hawkins and I work in the Library of the American Library Association (ALA), where my title is Library Reference Specialist. Chiefly I respond to questions about ALA and about libraries and librarianship from ALA staff, members, and nonmembers, by phone, fax, mail, e-mail, and, most recently, by chat/instant messaging.

But an even newer development in my reference duties has been appearing in and responding to questions while in the Second Life virtual world, specifically on ALA Island, in the Member Lounge, as the avatar, ALALIbraryVal Miles. My virtual self has already conducted an in-world book talk, discussing the various books available that teach and instruct about living and thriving in Second Life, and also created an in-world scavenger hunt, for the specific purpose of directing both new and long-existing avatars to some of the more interesting locations and destinations in Second Life, from its virtual space and sea museums to its islands devoted to television shows and cable channels to the incredible original creation of the Alliance Library System in Illinois, Info Island and its Second Life Library.

The scavenger hunt was meant to function much like ALA’s initial “50+ Great Web Sites for Kids & Adults” and its sequel, “700+ Amazing, Spectacular, Mysterious, Wonderful Web Sites for Kids and the Adults Who Care About Them,” in which the goal was to spotlight the many educational and cultural destinations available in this new online virtual space, as opposed to the adults-only destinations that receive a disproportionate amount of media attention, creating the impression that all there is to offer in this new space are such decidedly mature, even prurient entertainments. Nothing could be further from the truth. Second Life provides a brand new, one-of-a-kind opportunity to teach, learn, and communicate about any and all subjects in visually creative ways.

Your Second Life avatar is a 3-D representation of you, which types to communicate with other avatars via text chat (and now has the relatively new option to communicate through voice chat, speaking and listening to others using a headset that connects to your computer). So far, ALALibraryVal Miles has spoken in-world with:

a university librarian, working with a professor that has integrated Second Life into his accounting class assignments, who was looking for a library-related place to rent space and therefore expand her sole library kiosk and message board, in order to provide better library service to the professor’s students;

a university student, sent to me specifically by her professor (with whom I was acquainted), to talk out what kind of graduate-level Second Life library project she could create to complete her class with the professor;

a librarian from a prominent university library looking for advice on a possible in-world digitization project;

a librarian looking for groups devoted to teen and young adult literature;

and several others, including ALA staff, members, and nonmembers, who needed more direction and instruction on navigating the Second Life virtual world.

In order to continue the guidance provided by both the book talk and the scavenger hunt, a kiosk was built in the Member Lounge that freely distributes the detailed notecards that accompanied both events, so that any visitor to ALA Island can walk, fly, or teleport away with both more information on how Second life works and on what there is to see there. There is an intention to update these existing notecards and create new ones as needs arise.

The Second Life virtual world is a valuable, special addition to the services that libraries can provide and to the knowledge that ALA can pass on to its members.

Starting TODAY, Friday, June 27, there will be an Annual Conference Day-in-Review at Salon Huron on ALA Island (179, 201, 29) at 5:00 pm Second Life Time/Pacific Time (7:00 pm CT / 8:00 pm ET):

Join Oberon Octagon (aka Donavan Vicha), ALA Island Manager, and guests to discuss programs and meetings taking place in Anaheim for the 2008 ALA Annual Conference. We’ll meet in Salon Huron on ALA Island (179, 201, 29) at a time we hope falls between the end of meetings but ahead of dinner plans and night-time activities. Oberon is at ALA Headquarters in Chicago so he himself will have nothing to report, so please help him out along with others who aren’t able to attend!

FYI: Please keep in mind that this is Second Life’s Fifth Birthday and the Second Life Grid will be taxed! We’ll do our best to be there, though!

This Annual Conference Day-in-Review will be at 5:00 pm Second Life Time/Pacific Time today, Sunday, and Monday. However, on Saturday, June 28, the Day-in-Review will start at 4:00 pm Second Life Time/Pacific Time (6:00 pm CT / 7:00 pm ET) instead:

We will start an hour earlier on Saturday in order to get in on the Virtual Communities Members Interest Group Meeting at Salon Huron that is planned to run 90 minutes and will include visits with SLers in-world.

Meanwhile, for those Annual Conference attendees who are still puzzling out Second Life, be sure to visit the ALA Member Pavilion on the exhibit floor in the Anaheim Convention Center, where ALA staff member Christina Coleman will be presenting a demo of the Second Life virtual world at 1:00 pm (Pacific Time). The demo will be presented at 1:00 on Saturday, Sunday, and Monday.

For Midwinter and Annual each year, Keith Michael Fiels prepares an update of ALA activities for Council and the Executive Board. Here’s his latest report. Dates and locations for Council and Board meetings are available on the Annual 2008 wiki.

I guess the history is that Mary Ghikas, Senior Associate Executive Director of the ALA, used to put together an informal snapshot of numbers and events for each conference as an insider’s guide for staff. But word leaked out about its usefulness, and the document would get forwarded around to Council and other groups, so now it’s become the unofficial guide to conference and we post it here for everyone, staff and members.

So without further ado, here’s Mary’s 2008 Annual Guide (175kb PDF). Give it a read-through, put it on a flash drive, download it to your laptop, print it out if you need to, but it’s one of the most helpful documents you can take with you to conference.

Last year, as part of the ALA 2007 Annual Conference wiki, we set up a section for conference presentations, podcasts, and other conference content for use by registrants afterwards, and for extending the content of the conference to others. Meanwhile, the ALA Website Advisory Committee took up the challenge of finding ways to ensure that conference materials are more widely available, particularly as sessions are no longer audio-taped.

The upshot is a new the ALA Conference Materials Archive, on a wiki at http://presentations.ala.org/. The wiki already includes links to last year’s materials, along with links to similar material from some of ALA’s units. The goal is for all collateral conference material to be linked in some way from this wiki.

So, if you are a speaker at the ALA 2008 Annual Conference in Anaheim, here is the place for you to upload your handouts, or to publish links to your material, if it is resident on another site. Posting materials prior to conference ensures immediate access by attendees — waiting until after the conference means missing a valuable opportunity to share their knowledge and insights. And if you are interested in “going green,” then placing your handouts here will help! Once you add your materials to the wiki, please note this during your presentation (add “view or download more information at http://presentations.ala.org/” to your last .ppt slide, for example).

The wiki is pre-loaded with program titles (taken from the final AC 2008 program book listings) and is organized by day/time. Full instructions on using the wiki, including the attribution license, and a suggested convention for organizing materials and links, appears on the wiki.

Now, if you will not be with us in Anaheim (still time to change your mind!) or if you have one of those inevitable conflicts, know that there is now a place to find the conference material, this year and into the future.

Please know that you can always contact the ALA Library (library@ala.org) for assistance with locating more about a particular program.

Karen Muller & Valerie Hawkins

We’re always looking for new ways to help attendees connect with friends, friendsters, colleagues, and future friends at our conferences, and this year we’re experimenting with a new concept that we hope will also expose librarians to the concept of “big games.”

What’s a “big game?”
We’re all familiar with games – usually we play boardgames on tables, and more people than ever are playing videogames on screens. Both can be very social experiences, depending on the game and the players, but “big games” force you to interact with your surroundings and usually with other people. These are games that take place out in the physical world, and the everyday objects we take for granted are the playing pieces.

They use city blocks as grids for the playing field, and the game is usually a variant of capture the flag, tag, a scavenger hunt, or hide and seek. They often involve using cell phones to send or receive information, but not always. Some examples of big games include:

• cruel 2 b kind
• Payphone Warriors
• Come Out & Play Festival

You can learn more about big games here, and especially why they may be a good fit for some libraries, by listening to Greg Trefry’s talk at the 2007 ALA TechSource Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium. In his slides, he notes that libraries are ideal venues for this type of activity because we have things like tools (photocopiers, computers), secret codes (think Dewey Decimal System), a building for the game’s headquarters (sometimes multiple buildings if there are branches), and referees (librarians).

What does this have to do with Annual Conference?
Just as some libraries may want to use big games to interact more with their communities, ALA is experimenting with using a big game to help conference attendees interact more with us and with each other during our biggest deal of the year – Annual Conference. We’ll be in California next month, and there’s so much history around the state’s books, authors, and popular culture that it seemed like a natural fit to try a big game around that theme.

The style will be an information scavenger hunt, and the game is called California Dreaming. It’s being designed by Come Out & Play Productions, a company that specializes in these types of events. Anyone attending Annual can play for free, and though you could play on your own, you probably want to sign up for a team because the clues will be spread out across the entire convention center campus. Plus, the game will be played over two days (Saturday and Sunday, June 28-29), and you can’t be everywhere at once. You’ll find clues in conference materials, in sessions, on the exhibit floor, and elsewhere. You’ll be looking for questions about the history of California pop culture, and you can bring your answers to the Game HQ in the new Gaming Pavilion on the exhibit floor or you can text them to us.

If you want to sign up to play, you can join one of six teams:

1. Academic librarians
2. Library Society of the World
3. Public librarians
4. School librarians
5. Special librarians
6. Students

There will be some cool prizes (from companies such as The Cartoon Network, Electronic Arts, and Microsoft), so you’ll want to form teams ahead of time in order to hit the ground running when the game begins on Saturday morning (June 28). You can still sign up when things start on Saturday, June 28, but why not get started now? Watch for more information to appear from the California Myth Authority soon!