Hot off the Presses

Urban, Richard. (2007) Second Life, Serious Leisure and LIS. ASIS&T Bulletin. http://www.asist.org/Bulletin/Aug-07/urban.html

Aethalides

Originally uploaded by Musebrarian

I’m off this weekend to the Second Life Community Convention (http://slcc2007.wordpress.com)

Looking forward to the sessions lined up for the Education Track (http://slcc2007.wordpress.com/education-track/).

Sounds like there won’t be free wi-fi from the hotel, but I’ll try to blog what I can in the evenings.
Update: 

NMC has published all the papers for the track here.

Library [and Information Science] School to lead team that will preserve virtual worlds. 

With help from the Library of Congress, and in partnership with three other institutions of higher education and one commercial game lab, a team from Illinois’ Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) will lead a two-year project to preserve virtual worlds – early video games, electronic literature and “Second Life,” an interactive multiplayer game.

The project, titled “Preserving Virtual Worlds,” is thought to be the first effort to explore methods for preserving digital games and interactive fiction, and it comes not a moment too soon given that interactive media are “at high risk for loss as technologies rapidly become obsolete,” said Jerome McDonough, the GSLIS faculty member who will serve as lead investigator of the project. Janet Eke, also of GSLIS, is the project coordinator.

Illinois will coordinate the partners’ work on the project. Partners are the Rochester Institute of Technology, Stanford University and the University of Maryland, and Linden Lab, creator of “Second Life.” The Illinois team’s focus primarily will be technical.

So what will I be doing this semester?

LIS590QM Qualitative Methods
Another class adding methods to my bag of tricks. This will be more about observation, ethnography, structured and semi-structured interviewing and other techniques.

Sometimes I feel a little frustrated about how difficult it is to be interdisciplinary and to be in the know about what researchers at UIUC are doing. I’ve been trying to be proactive about this and scheduled some informal coffee meetings with faculty who are working in the area (and I’m about to head off to the “Museums Writ Large” reading group). The next two classes will help me get outside of GSLIS, and maybe also get some perspective on what I’m learning here.

LIS590PPL Public Pedagogies & Learning
One of the big holes in my knowledge about museums is the educational theory that underpins much of what we do. I’ve mostly been on the collections/exhibition/technical side of the museum world and have left the educating to the educators. But the more I look at virtual worlds such as Second Life, the more I’m feeling the need to fill that hole with some knowledge. I met Brenda through the IPRH Museums Write Large reading group and was pleased to learn that she’d officially been added to the GSLIS roster of faculty. Her research has focused on how history is presented in museum settings, something close to my heart. The course will itself be historical, tracing the different learning theories used in public institutions such as libraries, archives and museums.

ANTH517 Anthropological Approaches to Memory
Last year while poking around the “community of practice” literature I read a brilliant article by Janet Keller about how blacksmiths learn to do what they do (in Chalkin and Lave. Understanding Practice). This was just around the time that I was reading Lenore Sarasan’s ASC Survey Report on museum computerization in which she says:

Through major problems exist within many documentation systems, they appear to function adequetly becasue they are supported by a strong framework of oral tradition….Indeed, without oral tradition, many collections information systems would fail to fulfill the two basic functions of museum documentation. i.e. to lead the user to the specimen in a reasonable period of time , and to interrelate all the information sources, so that a user may easily find all the information recorded about an object within the system.

There’s been plenty of ink spilled about whether museum professionals are really professionals, or what kind of professionals we are. Even more so in discussing the functional role played by museum information professionals. Most of us learn much of what it means to be a member of the community through “on the job training” (OTJT) and participation in professional associations. All of this has kept me interested in the CoP approach, because I think it helps describe MIPs.

Turns out Janet Keller is faculty right here at UIUC and will be teaching Anthropological Approaches to Memory this fall:

Examines individual memory, the construction of memories in collective practice, and the orchestration of memory in social institutions such as museums and ritual. Reflects critically on primary sources, to integrate theory and ethnography and to compare alternative approaches.

I’m hoping to explore how we, the museum professioanal community, collectively create memory and rituals about what we do, why we do it, and how we formally (museum studies + academic disciplines) and informally (OTJT) transmit that to emerging professionals.

And lastly Hooray! This will be my last full semester of coursework as a PhD student. After this it will be dusting off my notes from the last two years and getting ready for field exams.

Yet another summer has come and gone. The Fall 2007 Semester starts on Wednesday of this week (but it’s really Monday….don’t ask…it’s a weird UIUC thing because of the Labor Day holiday).

The beginning of this semester has been somewhat bittersweet. I arrived in Champaign a little over two years ago, just as a new crop of new students started the MLIS program. A few of them graduated early and left the GSLIS nest in December, but a whole flock of them graduated in May. After a few months on the job market most of these fine folks have found amazing jobs all around the country. It’s been fun following the adventures of the early birds, which took the edge off of their departure – and there were still lots of people here. I’m already feeling a little lonely as one neighbor after another loads up and heads out of town. I know we’ll be in touch via Facebook, I’ll see your pix on Flickr and I’ll be reading your blogs, but you will be missed none-the-less.

Congratulations to all of your and best of luck in your new positions!

(cue Marlo Thomas…)

Registration is now open for the following dates:

Sept. 5 – Oct. 10
A 5 Week Online Course

September 20 or 21st
CDP@BCR – Denver, CO

October 5
Emory University – Atlanta, GA

I just finished transcribing the first interview for some research that I’m doing…whew..its been a long time since I’ve done this…see kids when I started doing this there were things called “cassettes”…I digress.

Things have changed since then – I found a great little OS X tool called Transcriva
that gives you a chat-like interface for transcribing each speaker. It keeps track of time codes and marks a little colored tick so you can see where each stops and starts. Very helpful when you want to pick up where you left off. Transcriva lets you export it out as an RTF or as text – with timestamps and speaker names inserted.

The free download watermarks the export and only lets you run for 20minutes straight – not too bad as you really need to take a break every 20 minutes or so anyway.

Now if I could just get this #&^@#%@* Sony foot pedal to work with my Mac, I’d be cooking…

Bartus also makes something called Temporus that looks like an equally easy app for making timelines. It’s supposed to work with Transcriva so you can get a timeline of a conversation. Not sure I see the benefits of that for what I’m doing, but would be quite useful say for transcribing a state of the union address or a new program. Temporus says it will export an “plist” XML file – apparently something Apple cooked up called a property list. You can also create a PDF, TIFF, or CSV.

I’m always on the lookout for timeline software…someone made a WordPress plugin that creates a SIMILE timeline out of your posts. I’ll need to give that a try…

via Darth Libris

“Isn’t it grand, boys?”
Singer and songwriter Tommy Makem, who rose to fame performing with the Clancy Brothers, has died at the age of 74 from cancer.

Let’s not have a sniffle,
Let’s have a bloody good cry.
And always remember the longer you live,
The sooner you’ll bloody-well die.

Watch a video (stupid YouTube embedding broken…ggrrr)

Old news by now – see what happens when you drop out of the world for a week… I grew up listening to the Clancy Brothers and have seen them live several time – the best being in the tiny small venue of the Tin Angel in Philly. If you haven’t read it, the Liam Clancy’s autobiography The Mountain of the Women: Memoirs of an Irish Troubadour provides a fascinating inside look at their lives.

(whoops, must have forgot to hit publish on this one…)

I’m spending the week at the San Diego Supercomputer Center, participating in the SC07 Summer Workshop Series.

I’ll be speaking tomorrow (Thurs, Aug. 2) at 10:30 PST. The sessions are being broadcast live archived online if you’d like to follow along (I’m certainly looking forward to listening to Tracey Fullerton before my talk). The presentation generally follows along others I’ve given about Second Life and museums, but this adds a little twist of what it might mean for the HASS community (I’ll also post a copy to Slideshare tomorrow morning).

Me (in the form of Aethalides Kukulcan) will be leading a group around in-world during our open lab session later in the day (provided the grid is up and working).