Good points about SL

This week I finally got to start looking through the SL books I checked out from Goldstein a few weeks ago. October has been a crazy month in my real life, but things are finally starting to settle down so I can really get researching on this final project.

I've only gotten to flip through one book so far, which is the Official Guide, but many of the points made so far are pretty obvious: the only limit to your SL is you imagination, use common sense in SL, and you can change your avatar's appearance as often and as quickly as you like.

There were a few points that stood out in my mind, the first being a line from the introduction. "In Second Life, changes that would take millenia of groaning and straining in the real world can be completed within a few hours. If real life is all about evolution, Second Life is evolution squared" (Rymaszewski, 2007, p. ix). For a library, this is both a good and a bad thing, and definitely something I need to take into consideration in my project plan. The inherent flexibility of SL gives libraries a great deal of freedom from real world restraints, like cost, amount and shape of space available to them, and the ability to think of something, try it, and then either keep or discard it within a matter of minutes. The downside to the constant fluidity of SL is how difficult it is to get a grasp on, especially for librarians who have many other demands on their time - who has time to learn it all when there are patrons standing at the desk, waiting to be helped? To this end, I think that if the LCLCPL decided to enter SL, much of the work should be done by one librarian, to better distribute staff time.

The other thing that stuck out in my reading this week was the mention of role-playing in SL. I know we covered this in class, and how there are different areas dedicated to role-playing, but the Official Guide dedicates quite a few paragraphs to them, spread across the first 3 chapters. This is something that I want to think about in my plan - for some teens, they may want to use part of the LCLCPL's space for Role-Playing Games (RPGs) or even special events that involve role-playing, like book talks or something. The librarian could even have a special day, like on International Talk Like a Pirate Day (Sept. 19) where he/she gets into a role for a day.

I think this book is really going to help me focus my plan, which is great - at this moment, I'm still a little overwhelmed with the project I've taken on, so anything that helps me focus my ideas is a good thing.