Cybrary

Had a cup of espresso in the Cybrary run by librarians at Info Island. It was totally deserted as you can see in the photo, so come keep me company, people! For anyone interested, there are plenty of spaces open for activity and the conference rooms set up here are far more interesting than in any rl hotel (anything is more inspiring than spending an entire day inside the moldy conference room of the Radisson in Chelmsford, where I recently gave a talk).

I combined searches in sl and on the web and found graduate student Richard Urban’s paper on Second Life museums, (http://www.richardurban.net/), which was presented this past April, in San Francisco, at the “Museums and the Web” conference sponsored by Archives and Museum Informatics. See link to Urban's paper. (http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/papers/urban/urban.html).

I joined the Museums in Second Life Group and found one of 28 identified archivists in sl and sent a query to the leader of Archivists of Second Life run by Christi Janus (Netherlands) and Dinnie Devonshire (Canada). Christi happened to be online and invited me into the group. He teleported me to Cybrary City II, where I landed next to a blank white scroll, the group’s signage, hanging in the air. “Obviously we need a logo. But we do have a mission statement”, which I read with interest. The group is in its infancy, and, knowing nothing about the humans behind the avies, who knows if we’ll even get along, but it’s a place to start. We took a seat on a couple of benches that had been set up around a campfire. “We didn’t want a traditional building. The campfire is where we tell stories and collect oral histories.” We talked for a few minutes, bickering almost immediately about the use of the word document as it pertains to archives.

Next, off to catch last hour of Brian Eno’s sl exhibition “77 million paintings” designed to coincide with the rl exhibition taking place at theYerba Buena Center for the Arts, SF. http://www.longnow.org/77m/