 Margo, you and Jaina had worked on a project together to pull in photos from the members' libraries. Right? How many photos did you get? 50, 60 photos? So let's do a thought experiment. Let's cut those number of photos in half and choose the ones that are best, that represent the best library space. So how would you go about doing that? And we can't go there. We can't physically go to that library, look around, see if the young adults are enjoying themselves. We have to look at the photos. We have to look at the digital representation of the space. So that's the assignment I was given. I was offered to go in and figure out a way to look at a virtual representation of a library space and say, this one based upon our rigorous findings has better qualities than that one. So how would you go about doing that? Right? So that's the purpose of my portion, very small portion of a very large grant. So that's what I want to talk about today. I'm not going to try and get you to sign up for Second Life Avatars, because I think that's probably yesterday's news. But we did use some of that technology and it was very inexpensive and very useful for this process of creating a virtual representation of a real-life space. So... All right, this is me. I'm a full-time lecturer. I've been at SLIS. How many of you graduated from San Jose State SLIS? So a good third to half the people in the room, right? There's about 75 people in the room here, so about 25 of you raised your hands. I've been teaching online since 1999 with SLIS since 2005, 2006. And really my focus has been connecting 3D virtual environments and representations with learning systems. So I'm going to show you, like, old news. I'm going to show you Second Life circa 06, 07, the big hype time. So let me show you some examples of what we were doing with Second Life back then. We're still doing some of the same stuff, but it's quite a bit more grounded now. This is more like marketing. And my first stop, a virtual class at the Second Life Campus at the School of Library and Information Science. Hello, class. How's everybody today? So that's a reporter on the right-hand side from PBS who came from the Quest Science program, came and interviewed us, and right at the peak of that sort of bubble of Second Life, you're going to be able to do everything. And this is Lily LeWoe, another hero of mine who's an incredible researcher at San Jose State, a ten-year faculty member who went to early tenure because she's really, really quite good. If you have a chance to associate with her or take a class with her, I highly recommend it. Introduce a visitor from KQED, and his name is Shiraz. Welcome, Shiraz. Hi, thank you guys so much for having me here. I'm doing a story for Quest on Second Life, so I'm really excited to be here. In today's class, we are going to do an exercise. You will break into pairs with one student playing the role of the user, another playing the role of the reference librarian. I paired up with Grayland Fairweather. In real life... See, they've got the headsets. A lot of people, a lot of classes in our program are doing live video conferencing. This is video with a 3D component. It's the only difference, really. In real life, she's a graduate student named Robin, who helped build a lot of San Jose State's Second Life Island. She was kind enough to answer a few questions. What sort of books have you come across in Second Life? How many books do you own in Second Life? And do you have to pay library fines if you check them out for too long? No. Any books that are in Second Life, you can either buy them or get them for free. I have, for example, the collected works of William Shakespeare and HP Lovecraft. And many books that are in the public domain, people have brought into Second Life. So I have about 19,000 items and perhaps 200 books on me. What if I came up to you and asked you about where I could find information on Second Life about aeronautics? Well, specifically for aeronautics, there is the International Space Flight Museum in Second Life. Or you can simply do a search for places and look up aeronautics or flight. The strange but inviting space made me feel like I was in school again, where everyone was smarter and better looking than me. Well, at least in Second Life, I was able to opt for a full head of hair. Any other questions or thoughts or comments? I just want to say that these are the most attractive reference desk librarians I've ever met. Alright, then. I love the dance, Robin. So that was sort of the naive thought that we were going to be able to serve patrons in a virtual environment who were residents in a 3D setting. All of that sort of fell away, became much less interesting. But we have done two things in Second Life in San Jose State that continues to bring students and have some positive educational outcomes. And the first one is a set of digital humanities courses that we've been running with different topics. So students come in together and create the Renaissance of Florence or pretend to be Tudor, Shakespearean-era people, where they come up here pre-Revolutionary France in fall. And students, 20 to 30 students, will come in and do some digital humanities, content construction, role play. And it's interesting. They can do, let me get back in here, show you some displays. So this is a very cheap and ineffective way to do displays, to practice building displays and talk to each other about the arrangement of humanities content in a physical space. So the students are arranging these things, record keeping in Renaissance Italy. They're talking to each other about how they've arranged the information, how they're telling a story. You can see in the back there they've got the slides, and then interactive items around the edges of the stage. So the students aren't experts at multimedia development or anything. They've gone and purchased these things and sort of put them together. So they're telling a story with 3D objects, found objects. But they get to talk about collection development and arranging spaces and things like that. So it's sort of training wheels. Here's another one. Again, you see the slide presenter on the left-hand side. Some very interesting Renaissance era science tools on the right-hand side. There's a prey. You can go over there and prey in the left, have an animation for your avatar. Might as well use this, huh? Right here you can prey, have your avatar go and prey, all these science instruments, and the slide projector here on the left-hand side. So each of the students gets one of these little lockers or carousels, and they can go in there and build a kiosk about art and medicine with the nuns in Florence in Renaissance Italy. So that's one thing. We've done digital humanities. We've used Second Life. We've had the students go in, and they've really enjoyed themselves and done some interesting work. The second thing we've done is more of the, somebody mentioned Twitter, the social media aspect. So we have a virtual center for archives and records administration. We actually have a full second master's degree, a MARA degree. That's not an MLIS. And that group gets in there and has conferences and presentations, and they do poster sessions, and they really are about promoting this career option of archivist records administrators and doing it focusing on cultural heritage. So that's two of the successful continuing efforts in Second Life. But this grant, the one that I'm going to talk about, the work that we did with, this is a student, Lori Harris, and also Julie Whitehead, who's graduated since, was to do, as Anthony described, surveys of hundreds of library spaces, videos of dozens, and now 3D spaces recreated from, and I'll show you six. We've taken those surveys, he sent videos to the librarians, about, what, about 20 librarians and 20 young adults, yeah, created the videos, then we took those and parsed the videos and recreated these spaces in a virtual environment. And the goal is to say, how do we know which space is better without having access to the space? So when Margo goes and grabs all those photos from all of your libraries, how can we, how can we do an evaluation of those spaces without actually going there? And that's what we've tried to do. So we rebuilt six of them, and the point is to measure and analyze public commentary. And there's a precedence here, actually. This isn't something only done in recently. So here are some, the virtual representations. These, I actually do not know where these libraries are. They are real libraries, I don't know where they are. I think we just anonymized the video and didn't focus on the location of the videos, the location of the libraries that we were modeling. I'm going to show you specifically, if you can see the laser pointer, this area right here, there's a media room, and like Anthony talked about, that trough, so there's a trough there in the window. And we're going to go, I'm going to show you some video going down around this space. So the key questions here, the key questions for my portion of this grant is can we evaluate these spaces using simulation? Does it help to evaluate them? Can we do it? Are there any advantages from taking the evaluators out of the actual spaces? So if we have all the photos that Margot put together, showing them to a person and getting information, getting feedback from that person, is that helpful to separate that person from the actual space? Kind of counterintuitive. You think you just want to put them there and they can look around and tell us how they like it. But there's actually some benefits from separating the people from the space itself. Is there any new field of inquiry? Can we go, can we take this further and build the literature in this area? So here's some precedents, here's some background. At New York Law School, there was an island, the Second Life Island in 2006, where they created a 3D wiki and they rebuilt, how would you like to build portions of Queens, New York? So they rebuilt portions of Queens, New York and brought the public in to show them what the possible, that possible neighborhood in Queens would look like. So that's something. Landing Lights is the name of the island and that was New York Law School. Another one much more recent was a colleague of mine in Scotland, Daniel Livingston, rebuilding, taking a class of students who were more proficient in virtual environments and multimedia construction to have them go in and look at urban regeneration. So we're going to plan the town of Paisley, Scotland and we're going to bring students in to have them sort of build some strawman example of what the town could look like. And here's some screenshots from that. They use all different platforms, so there's not just Second Life, here's Open Wonderlands, another one. This is the high street for Paisley, the shopping street, and you can see that the students had built out, actually this is pretty faithful to what was there. So it's possible to build out urban settings. Here's another one, the Town Hall and Abbey on the left and more of the Town Center and War Memorial here in a different platform. They even used Minecraft. If you're all familiar, if you have an elementary school student, you'll know all about Minecraft. They weren't able to get the kind of look and feel that they wanted to out of minecraft, so it wasn't as useful. So they had to take photographs of the space and then map it on their models. That's not possible in Minecraft. Here's another one, the shopping district there in Paisley as well. Okay. So that's some precedent. This is being done. It's not just our grant. People are doing this all around the world, creating 3D virtual environments and representations and then trying to get feedback about it. So let me show you one of the videos. You didn't show a video, right, Anthony? So this is great. This is a video of an adult. I believe it's an Idaho who has a teen space. Let me show you what he had to say. When you were talking about what they were interested in, it kept ringing a bell, because he talks about the collections and separation and the art. Later on, I'll show you the same space with a teen narrator. You can see her different perspective. Since I started representing the library, is it student? It looks like I don't have the adult. So let me just do the teen. This is the second of the three videos I was going to show. On the left-hand side, over here, you have the actual teen holding the camera, talking about the new space that she really enjoys. And you can tell she talks about furnishing. She talks about how it makes her feel. You can get some of the transcript and the verbatim, the talking from her. And then on the right-hand side, I also have the virtual environment, the second-life virtual environment, the version of the same space. Actually, I'll probably try and play this twice. It's only a few 20 or 30 seconds. So on the left-hand side, she's talking. On the right-hand side is the virtual environment recreation of that space. We made this new room. It used to be the audio-visual room for the handicap, but we have turned it into a really cool teen space. We have art that's been donated on the walls. We also set up three different computers for teens to research and study with, which I think is very, very handy. We also have pretty cool chairs here that are new along with a room to encourage reading comfortably. We also have all of our animated graphic books located in here now. We also have a TV here hooked up to a Wii with remotes that... Okay, so you get a good idea. On the left-hand side was her talking about the artwork and on the right-hand side, you saw the second-life materials that we'd rebuilt based upon this video. One thing that we did immediately is take those videos and very meticulously slice them into one or two second pieces and look for every object that was in those videos. So we found nearly 800 data points from six of the videos, and we took a lot of screen captures of those videos over and over and over again and created a spreadsheet that looked like this. And then you can see this is one example of that mural. So we were looking at everything in that space, each piece of furniture, each piece of media, each piece of electronics, seating. And here's an example of the mural outside of that window. So this is a scene outside the second room, a window mural that said, be more, do more, live more, 14s. We have a screen capture, and then we also... If we were a seating option, we also looked for that same seating option out on the web. So we tried to find the same seat for sale somewhere. So we were able to take those six or seven different library spaces and slice those into 700 individual pieces to find all the different parts of those. Here's some more conversions. You can see there on the top left is the real-life space, and on the bottom right you've got the computer. So we were able to buy the computers in Second Life and for a buck or two and place them in the spaces. All of the cabinetry and everything we found, pretty similar cabinetry, more computer workstations, those were very easy to find. So there's a whole catalog of things for sale in Second Life. A lot of things... One of the things we did is every single sign we could find, we tried to recreate it and place it into Second Life so that people who looked through the space would have a good feeling for what was there, more computer spaces with these walls, carousels, such as over and over and over again, getting as many details as we possibly could exactly the same. So then we had a floor plan. Without looking at the library website or any of that, we went to the videos and created floor plans based upon the videos and then also all of the textures, any carpeting, things like that. So I got five minutes. The folks who we wanted to evaluate this was sort of a convenient sample of our own students. So we took our own students and had them go into Second Life with a possible community of a couple thousand people. We had them go into Second Life with avatars, walk around the spaces, and then complete a web survey about the space. So we had 40 surveys completed, two rounds from May to October. You can see the average age was mid-thirties, so older than our students. Our students tend to be mid to late-twenties and 85% female. So the things that we asked them, we told them the kinds of improvements that we were thinking of, and these are some of the things that they were responded to, this wireless connectivity. This was very important, kind of interesting. Because in Second Life, I mean there's no wireless connectivity, but the students, the ones who went in, thought that this was an important thing for the library to have. Event space, exhibit space, seating options. And this was one too, virtual merchandising in the library. So we asked them if that was something that they thought would improve the space and technology. Storage, all these different things that we've offered them as an option. So two, this is probably important, two main results here was that the age of the respondent didn't make a terribly big difference. Now if they were younger, younger students or older students, it didn't make a very large difference. So here you see the red ones, the bar on the top. These are people 36 to 55. The ones on the bottom, these are our students who were 18 to 35. Generally the same trend line. And here you can see better wireless. Younger folks and older folks, they agreed pretty much with library space you should have better wireless. Generally. So not a lot of difference based upon their age. That was kind of interesting, I didn't expect that. But, okay, yeah, more of that. Okay, look at this, this is the other thing, this is the point of not having the people go to the actual space. Because we can make, we can do AB comparisons. I can actually tweak the space and pull out one single thing and have the same population look at that, those two in an AB, kind of an AB comparison. So here's an example of a space that doesn't say teen over here on the right hand side. That big mural, we just blew it away. So we're going to evaluate these two spaces and the only thing we're going to change is the fact that it doesn't say for teens. It doesn't say it's for young adults. So we can do that in this environment because it's simulated. That's a key point I think of the presentation. You can evaluate a space, but can you evaluate a slightly altered version of that space? And in this case you can. I thought this was really fascinating, that respondents who saw that big teen label in the window, they were less interested in suggesting things like academic technology. They didn't think you needed more computers and printers for teens. If it were a teen space, they didn't think that was terribly interesting. Also, better wireless connectivity. Here, the ones who saw that teen space logo, these are college students, these are MLIS students. They didn't think wireless was so important for the young adults. But for the generic people, the people who saw a space that didn't say young adults, give me wireless because it's my space as a college student, as an MLIS student. I need wireless. I need academic technology. So you really saw some bias in the reviewer, the person who was reviewing the space based upon whether they thought it was a teen space or not. It's the same exact space. The only thing we did was take off the label. So you could see some bias there in the way that the MLIS students evaluated these spaces. So that's really interesting to be able to do this, to look at pretty much the same thing as real life. It's the same structure. It's got the same decorations and everything. Everything's the same except you're able to pull off, strip off that personality, the teen personality. And our students didn't think teens needed better wireless or that teens really needed more academic technology compared to if they thought it was a teen space. So that's interesting that you can take the evaluator out of a real space and start to see some of the bias there. So the key question, can we evaluate library spaces from afar? Yeah, darn right. And we can even do it with photos too. I mean, Margot could have done it with her 60 or 70 photos too. It's more interesting and more hands-on and tactical, if you can get in there and walk around with an avatar. Is there any advantage for separating the evaluators from the real spaces? And there is because you can see some bias. You're able to change that space in very subtle ways and see the bias of the evaluator. And does this open up any new fields of inquiry? I think it does. We have to continue chomping through the numbers and continue throwing different populations into those virtual environments and getting feedback from them on what they think a good library space looks like. But I think this opens up some interesting stuff. Thanks.