Report from VW-LEM

I am finally finding time to document some of the thoughts that I had in the context of the VW-LEM. I used the occasion of a panel discussion to bring these up at the conference, and I thought it might be worth capturing that moment here as well.

For that audience I provided a bit of my personal background as context, including that I received my Masters in Library Science degree from San Jose State University in 1972, in the era of paper records and catalog cards in drawers with rods. I worked for 12 years in the Palo Alto City Library system, including some early library automation projects. From there a number of job moves landed me in IBM, where I currently work on things like business process management (BPM) enabled by service-oriented architecture (SOA). What brought me into virtual worlds was an IBM research project called “rehearsal services”, so that I came in as a non-gamer, but with a real business mission. Since then, my life has changed in so many ways, because of my virtual world involvement. Once I got involved in Second Life, one thing led to another and I found myself staring down the barrel of a great honor when I was chosen for the NMC Board of Directors. So I did feel like a bit of a host of the conference, which was held on NMC’s Conference Center island in Second Life.

I could have given a whole talk on IBM’s virtual world activities, the multiple virtual environment platforms we’re working with, the thousands of avatars, the meetings, the projects, the work with clients, etc. I could also have given another whole talk simply on doing business in virtual worlds. I’ve given those talks a number of times. But instead of that, I wanted to mention a few points to the audience of educators and library and museum professionals.

One thing I always like to point out is that historic economic forces and global trends are afoot. A long wave economic viewpoint (a la Carlota Perez) tells us that we are in a decades-long opportunity to benefit from deeply integrating information and communications technologies into the fabric of society. This is a time to focus on societal well-being, as has been the case in previous iterations of the long wave, back to the 1700s. What is different now is that this particular technology (ICT) is fundamentally social in nature, and the social aspects are continuing to emerge with Web 2.0 social networking, and in particular virtual environments. This supports trends we can see toward, virtualizing organizations, opening organizations, and ever more complex forms of collaboration. Once organizations are virtualized and open, they are coming back together in new ways, such as convergence of libraries, museums and educational institutions.

I think these trends support my expectation that virtual environments will increasingly emerge as significant communication and collaboration platforms. I believe that they will be widely used, and increasingly integrated with other forms of social technology in what the NMC’s 2008 Horizon Report calls “social operating systems”. These environments are unstoppable, especially since the most important characteristic of virtual worlds is their ability to foster an immersive, social experience.

I was thinking that everything we see and do in a virtual environment can be repurposed for the library experience. So much of what exists in VW, and so much of what happens here, is very information intensive. People are building things from which we can learn, just by observing or inspecting them. Every single thing in the virtual environment can carry scripting and text. Every building, every tree, every fanciful art work might be used to organize or serve up information.

So the key questions become:

• How can we use these things in library work?
• How can we bring library resources into this environment?
• How can we bring cool configurations of specific resources to specific meetings and virtual classrooms? In other words, can we rez special purpose library/museums for special purposes, and then tuck them back into inventory to use again later?
• How does this change the nature of libraries?

This is where we are seeing the three domains of libraries, education, and museums beginning to intertwine. How does this begin to change our conception of what we can or should be doing in the brick and mortar world?

We need to continue improving our use of virtual environments for rich collaborative interactions — interactions with information and with other human beings via that information. The good news is that we are all in the vanguard of this. We are living in it, communicating and creating within it … and having fun in lovely settings to boot!

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 16th, 2008 at 9:36 am and is filed under libraries, virtual-worlds. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.