What is the Library of the Future?

JISC "What is the Library of the Future?" debate - attend in SL - Thursday 2 April 2009, 14.00 - 17.30pm (UK time)

The JISC are holding a BBC Question Time style event in Oxford next week discussing the future of the libray.  40 places are also available to attend and contribute virtually in Second Life.

Details about the Second Life venue will be emailed to you following registration.

Note that all delegates (including those attending virtually) are asked to provide a question for the panel as part of the registration process.

What is the Library of the Future?

You are cordially invited to join the future of the library "Question Time" style debate to consider how researchers, learners and society at large can be best served by information into the future?

JISC and Oxford University Library Services are jointly hosting a public question and answer debate in order to discuss what information and library provision mean in these changing times; technology has had a huge effect on the behaviour of both information consumers and service providers. What is the library and what do libraries need to do in order to support knowledge, innovation and society?

The event will take place on Thursday 2 April 2009 in the Martin Wood Lecture Theatre, Department of Physics, University of Oxford from 2.00pm until 5.30pm. It will be followed by a reception in the Divinity School, Bodleian Library, until 7.00pm.  We also have some Second Life places available.

To register for your place at the event: http://www.jisc-events.co.uk/

Unable to attend but want to follow or interact with the event?

The event will be amplified beyond the walls of the library:

• Via the JISC libraries of the future blog - tag #LOTF09
• Via live web streaming on the day and available for download after the event;
• Via Twitter, tag #LOTF09

All the links and feeds can also be found at the libraries of the future home page

World builder

Impressive short movie from Bruce Branit:

World Builder from Bruce Branit on Vimeo.

World Builder was shot in a single day followed by about 2 years of post production.

Nothing to do with Second Life, except in the similarity of building techniques, and the fact that despite all the technology the resulting virtual world looks disappointingly like the real world :-)

[Via Digital Urban]

Theatron

News from the Theatron project:

Looking for a place in Second Life for performance, a resource for the study of theatres, inspiration for creativity, or just a neat place to take a look at? Then you might want to take a look at Theatron Island .

Theatron is a project run by King's Visualisation Lab at King's College London and funded by Eduserv. Seven theatres are available on the site; these are Theatre of Pompey, (Roman) Epidaurus, ( Greece , Greek and Hellenistic) Globe Theatre, ( London , Renaissance) Odeion of Pericles, ( Greece , Greek and Hellenistic) Piran Round, ( Cornwall , UK , Medieval Hellerau Festspielhaus, ( Hellerau , Germany , 20th C) Odeion of Agrippa, ( Greece , Hellenistic and Roman)

If you would like to arrange a visit, or book the space for a class, then please contact Mark Childs (mark.childs@coventry.ac.uk ), IM Gann McGann inworld, or follow this SLURL to the viewing platform. Only one of the theatres is rezzed at any one time, but any of the other theatres can be rezzed on request.

Theatron Island is part of the Theatron Project, which also involves the UK Higher Education Academy's English Subject Centre and PALATINE , the Dance, Drama & Music Subject Centre. Five other institutions from across the UK are performing and creating within the Theatron spaces. More information about the project is available and you can take a look at the findings as we develop them at our wiki. A project website is under development and will be launched shortly.

The Manual

This is the best SL resource I've seen for some time... The Manual: a list of 81 in-world activities ranging from easy (#1) to hard (#24) and the sublime (#28) to the ridiculous (#50).  Kudos to the guys at Leeds (@kisa and @cubistscarboro) for pulling this stuff together.

Facets of virtual worlds

Sarah Robbins' Virtual Worlds Facet Study is now available as a Google spreadsheet .  There's a lot of material here, covering 70-odd virtual worlds, so it's well worth looking at.

Tom Eckersley exhibition

As a spare time activity I'm putting together an exhibition of posters by Tom Eckersley for the ArtsPlace gallery on Eduserv Island.  The posters, 24 of them, have been selected (and used with permission) from the Eckersley Archive hosted by the Visual Arts Data Service (VADS).

As with any activity like this in the UK, clearing rights over the images has taken a while but I'm grateful to staff at VADS for dealing with this side of things on my behalf.

As you can see, I've got as far as uploading the images and plonking them onto poster sized prims.  Note that I used Picnik, the online image manipulation tool, to add a frame to each poster.  Now I need to get the sizes and aspect ratios correct, position them on the walls of ArtsPlace and create a notecard for each holding VADS catalog record for each of the selected posters.  Shouldn't be too long, assuming I get my finger out.

Watch this space...

AudioStreaming Firecaster

When we hold RL events for which there is a SL audience we usually use voice-chat to carry audio from the live presentations to the SL delegates.  I've always felt uncomfortable about using Art Fossett to carry this audio, even in those cases where it is Andy Powell who is speaking but particularly so in other situations.

For tomorrow's Maximising the impact of Virtual Worlds in Teaching and Learning event in Glasgow I've created a new avatar, AudioStreaming Firecaster, just to carry the audio from the event onto Eduserv Island. AudioStreaming will be positioned just next to the slides (that Art Fossett will be displaying in-world in sync with the RL speakers' slides).  That's leaves Art Fossett free to move around the SL venue as I see fit.