Living a Second Life

/ Jane Stevenson / 3 Comments

Second Life screenshot
I attended a talk on Second Life today by Andy Powell of Eduserv. Second Life is a 3-d virtual world that is currently being very hyped up and has received a great deal of interest from educators interested in its potential for e-learning.

Second Life (SL) is free to enter and navigate around, but in order to really get involved you need to buy land, which effectively means buying server space with Linden Labs, the developer and owner of the software. The world is populated by avatars (residents) but Andy warned that those who are looking for a gaming environment would be disappointed – Second Life does not have a purpose as such; it is generally used to buy, sell, entertain and learn. In fact, you can (within acceptable limits) do what you like within SL, including building your own games, houses, galleries, offices and shops.

The software does require a high spec machine, which is likely to limit its value to schools and colleges, but it does have potential as a useful learning environment. You could, for example, buy a plot of land, build a gallery and show an exhibition of archive materials, complete with notes about each exhibit and links to the online catalogues. You could also decide to have a lecture space where you run a slideshow – Andy had just such a space on ‘Eduserv Island’ where he was showing the PowerPoint slides for the day’s session. You can also have an audio presentation as QuickTime is integrated with SL. The main drawback is that you can only have about 40 people in a space at any one time, but it is likely that this will change over time.

You communicate in SL by chat, either public or private, which effectively means typing rather than true audio communication, though this is apparently proposed for future versions of SL. You create your own profile, which may include your interests and skills, and you can create groups of friends so that you are told when a friend is currently in SL.

Andy had built himself a shoe shop and was designing and selling shoes for

Archival Word of the Week: Ephemera

/ Jane Stevenson

Tonite onlyGeneric name for published documents which are designed to perform a specific task at a specific time, and expected to be forgotten or thrown away after use – although they might be retained for a striking design or as a souvenir of an event. Ephemera include posters, tickets, and leaflets. Does this blog count as ephemera? I don’t know.

These temporary documents tend to be littered with ‘linguistic shifters’ – relative terms such as ‘tonight’ or ‘here’ – which always require contextual information to make any sense at all.

Link: ephemera
Link: Carried away

Archival Word of the Week: Chit

/ Jane Stevenson

Chit saying 'This person is entitled to one Hot-Cross bun'Noun, Anglo-Indian. Alright, it’s not an archival term, but it might be useful for certain kinds of memo. Perhaps it just entered the lexicon at the wrong time! I hope this handy word won’t be killed off by American English.

All the vocabulary in this weekly feature so far has been of Latin or French origin. A variety of Latin was used by officials and academics into the 18th century, and of course archival theory developed in France. That’s not to mention those Anglo-Normans!

See also: Cor, blust, squit!

Archival Word of the Week: Provenance

/ Jane Stevenson

Rugby playerEvery archival collection is unique, and the individual documents within them are likely to be unique as well, so it’s essential to establish where a collection has come from, and what has happened to it over time – so that researchers can then judge the quality of the material, and place it within a context where it can be interpreted. Descriptions on the Archives Hub provide details of provenance under the headings ‘Custodial History’ and ‘Immediate Source of Acquistion’. Archivists and researchers also use the phrase ‘chain of custody’ or ‘chain of ownership’ when discussing provenance.

Undergraduate experience of university libraries

/ Amanda Hill

Library shelves, University of ManchesterA post by Brian Mathews (a librarian at the Georgia Institute of Technology) on his Ubiquitous Librarian blog compares undergraduate levels of library usage and satisfaction in UK and US universities. He looked at information from SCONUL and compared it with statistics from the US Association of Research Libraries (ARL). He notes that usage of libraries by undergraduates is much higher in the UK:

…86% indicate daily or weekly use, while the US is around 50%. When asked about using library web resources they were at 77% daily/weekly, while US was between 40-50%.

but that levels of satisfaction with space and resources are much lower and that our printed materials and journals are ‘barely adequate’. He expresses surprise at this, but it sounds like an issue of under-resourcing to me and probably won’t surprise staff working in UK universities. The difference in usage levels are interesting though – why are they so much higher here?

BBC 2.0

/ Amanda Hill

BBC2's opening night logoThe Archives Hub’s funding body, JISC, held a one-day conference on Tuesday in Birmingham. One of the keynotes was by Tom Loosemore, of the BBC’s Future Media and Technology section. The slides and notes of Tom’s talk on the fifteen Web Principles of BBC 2.0 are worth a look.

The image of BBC2 on its opening night has been taken from The Ident Zone. The logos from the BBC’s own site can’t be shared on the web (cf. Principle #13).

Travel tip for Berlin conference

/ Amanda Hill

I’ll be talking about the Archives Hub at the International Standards for Digital Archives Conference which runs from 24-26 April in Berlin.

I’d booked my flights a month or so back, but discovered yesterday that British Airways had cancelled them. Great. Couldn’t alter the booking online, so I spent 10 minutes on hold on the 0870 number trying to get through to the airline to get alternative flights. Then my brighter other half used the brilliant ‘Say No to 0870‘ site to see if there was an alternative, cheaper number. Even better, there’s a freephone number: 0800 123111 and my call to that number was answered straight away (as BA have pay for those calls). Thought I’d share this just in case anyone else is in the same situation!

Archival Word of the Week: fl.

/ Jane Stevenson

Flower bedAbbreviation for the word ‘flourit’, ‘fluorit’, or ‘floruit’. The Oxford English Dictionary says ‘floruit‘, but you will probably see these variations, even on the Archives Hub, very sorry about that. Pronounced ‘floor-yuh-it’. When an index term for a proper name requires a date, but if neither the birth nor end date is known to the cataloguer, then the archival material being described can provide a date when its creator ‘flourished’, in the sense that they were obviously active, rather than at the peak of their career or somesuch. Illustration with apologies to Sonny Carter.