With all the thinking stuff on second life, I ran a test, as I do.

 

Went to an island called Borders, which appears designed in a most strange way, looked in their catalogue, even more strange, asked a staff member, and for stg 1.99 bought a copy of Gulliver's travels, Penguin.  They must be losing money.

 

The first two pages, before the title page, gave me enough material for about twenty knowbots then the organisation of the chapters, but without an index, and the maps, gave enough material with which to ponder second life.  Indeed he refers to linden lands and islands rather too often, like the idea, as with Yahoo, has been taken by someone who has read?

 

Which gets me to what I wonder we should be thinking about with second life, both as a world in which to teach, learn and research, as well as one which might have wider implications?

 

Our core competence is the naming and ordering, or arrangement of things; usually those things organised in documents, rather than all things.  Warburg's point was the information is in the neighbourhood, what we might call ontologenic and phylogenic taxonomy?  So what we want is not only to learn how to organise books on shelves and produce catalogues - catalogues which are not dependent on grep!  

 

In Dorchester there is a wonderful library which has never seen a computer and where the catalogue is on cards, in drawers, which you pull out, and all the subject headings are displayed in little pop up colour coded tabs, which also gives an idea of the density of the material within the category.

 

Cards appear in second life, as do tabs, so perhaps we want drawers which pull out?  Then the drawers expand to show categories, ontologies, connectors and concentrators.  This take us to purpose.  What is the thing for?  Then perhaps we need the categories of users, professionals doing the day job, experts doing the other things in life in which they are not expert, amateurs, doing something despite not being paid to do it, students, artists, citizens, for we all explore and approach issues with multidimensional personalities?  Building things for professionals doing the day job seems the easy bit.  Designing courses for students, or selecting the material to back up, seems to raise the issue of what is the learning for, who decides, who pays, who selects, who is selected and who decides, and in some way this has always been what libraries have challenged and changed, and most of the world is blissfully unaware?

 

We could use new information and communication technologies to widen the reach, or to restrict it.  Most ICT has actually done the latter.  Librarians are committed to the UN declaration of human rights about the access to information and freedom of expression, most professionals in ICT not?  Discuss?  Build an island?  A Swift dialogue? A dialectic of liberation?


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