 everyone and welcome to the 4 p.m. to 4 30 p.m. session of the 2017 open simulator community conference as a reminder to our in-world and web audience you can view the full conference schedule at conference dot open simulator org and tweet your questions or comments to at open sim cc with the hashtag pound 2017 this session we are happy to introduce a terrific session called virtual worlds database Connect with the metaverse and our speakers today are Elise Donovan Jones Valerie Hill and Marie Vance Elise Donovan Jones is an MLIS student at San Jose State University School of Information Her concentrations are in archives digital curation and virtual worlds Donovan Jones is also vice president of the community virtual library a member of the SJSU iSchool special libraries Association student chapter and student leadership representative for the virtual Center for archives and records administration student group Valerie Hill precedent of the community virtual library received a PhD in library and information science in 2012 Formerly a school librarian. Dr. Hill is a library and information science educator with a research focus on the intersection of information literacy and global dignity digital participatory culture Marie Vance is a senior research scientist at Hewlett Packard labs working on in HP's print Adjacencies and 3d lab She is an author of over 50 technical papers and holder of 24 us patents She received her PhD in computer science from Colorado State University and more recently her MLIS from San Jose State University Her in-world interests include the use of virtual worlds for distance education Welcome all let's begin the session Welcome everyone. I'm Valerie Hill. I'll be speaking first I'm president of the community virtual library a virtual world library in second life Kitely Sible Lounge and coming soon to other hyper grid locations Along with my colleague colleagues at least donovan Jones and Marie Vance I'll be sharing our goal to connect resources and Communities in our presentation today virtual worlds database connect with the metaverse Our main virtual world library branch of the community virtual library is located in second life And is moving next month to the library land on Cookie Island We'll have a grand opening with tours of our main library exhibit areas art gallery space and more Live librarians have been working in second life and have been exploring other virtual worlds for over a decade now Our goal is to promote virtual worlds for education and for other fields through highlighting high quality immersive simulations and through networking with communities as a project of new media arts incorporated the community virtual Libraries website can be found at community virtual library dot wordpress.com our mission statement is is The community virtual library is the hub that connects digital citizens in virtual worlds with the information and resources they seek Explore that site and you'll learn more about connecting with the community virtual library Promoting excellent virtual world resources and learning how to partner with us to share your work in virtual world spaces after a decade of Virtual world librarianship. We are learning what information needs can best be served in a virtual world We ask ourselves What can we offer virtually that can't be delivered physically to library and information seeking individuals? We have found that virtual worlds offer live Global connectivity with a sense of presence that goes beyond a chat screen Librarians can help with navigation of information landscapes and with evaluation of content in all formats virtual world librarians can provide creative programming and Can advocate for digital citizenship which is currently an essential set of skills For everyone in digital culture. I mentioned that our main branch is in second life However, we're exploring numerous other grids and Networking with hyper grid experts with the goal of helping people find information across the metaverse Recently we toured a hyper grid train station with the Rockcliff virtual world librarian in Avocon our goal in Kitely is to provide a hyper grid library and a digital citizenship museum Which Marie is going to tell you about reference services and librarianship in virtual worlds Is very similar to working in a physical library yet? We've discovered after several years that sitting at a virtual desk waiting for patrons to come in Can actually be an isolating and lonely experience Instead librarians in virtual spaces are not limited to sitting at a desk We can embed ourselves in communities to help connect people People are what make virtual worlds real places Not the simulations although some of the simulations are amazing Only through connecting people and communities can real learning take place in virtual worlds So people interested in science and medicine or in art and literature Whatever subject they need help finding communities across grids To that end the community virtual library has begun a virtual world database And it's our hope that others will share this database and will add content both high quality immersive learning spaces and Communities can be found in this searchable online database as real Resources shared by real librarians and Elise is going to explain that Thanks, Val. Let me go ahead and get myself together. Hi. I'm Elise Donovan Jones I'm an MLIS student at San Jose State University School of Information so I'll be speaking about the virtual worlds database and Basically, it is CVL's effort to connect virtual world communities outside of virtual worlds as well as inside And it's also how we hope to connect non virtual world users to our resources So educational communities like CVL provides spaces and resources within virtual worlds like Second Life and OpenSim For learners educators and information professionals So the database began when Val came to Marie and me and asked if we knew of a free Non-coding secure platform that CVL might use to create a database The database would categorize describe preserve and make virtual world communities more publicly accessible As a result, I worked with three other iSchool MLIS students as part of a class for digital curation In order to identify a platform for the database as well as identify other helpful information like which categories to use So the image on this slide is a snapshot of the database which is now live and The virtual world communities collection is currently accepting entries And I'm going to go ahead and paste in the links for those and I will mention we do also have the links to those up at our gazebo exhibit for everyone Okay, so why are we trying to catalog virtual worlds well documenting virtual worlds is important So that future generations know what information professionals and educators have accomplished with virtual worlds It's especially important because virtual worlds are ever-changing and once a simulation disappears It's difficult if not impossible to find traces of it There's also a lack of in-world tools for searching simulations and communities that currently exist So users often have to already know the exact name of the community If they want to find it and searching based on a single term doesn't guarantee the user will find a relevant safe community for their needs There have been other attempts some more and some less successful than others in the past To our knowledge though, no other searchable database has been published to date Especially with the intent of connecting and documenting Educational communities as resources, which is the case with our virtual world communities collection. That's part of our database Additionally, most other attempts are in the form of lists and spreadsheets created by individuals or communities with the Entries not shared or collaborated on publicly or without a long-term plan for create curation So most communities have in-world collections of landmarks But the collections there are usually only browse only a user can't search a wall of images They really can only browse and there are many commercial and individual blogs wikis and websites that host a really cool best of Websites and collections that are spotlighted and They're often geared though towards very specific audiences Maybe business or maybe towards a specific world like second life or open sim And they don't really attempt to document or preserve the information Usually once something is no longer popular, it'll be replaced with something that is popular The virtual world communities collection in the virtual worlds database allows users to search and browse past and active virtual Communities from online regardless of whether they've ever set foot in the virtual world and our hope is that it will inspire Partnerships increase virtual world participation and educational and information communities and contribute to the documentation of virtual worlds Sorry, I was trying to get my my slide correct there So I've mentioned the database is active and I'd like to take a little time to discuss its current progress The virtual worlds database consists of two collections the virtual world communities and virtual worlds landmarks collection The landmarks collection was informed by CVL's landmark spreadsheet, which was a list created and collected and put together by Val We aren't currently adding to it, but we will continue to curate the collection and we might build on to it in the future The virtual world communities collection is our current focus and it's the inspiration for building the database But what's the difference between communities and landmarks? Well landmarks represent a specific space or object So for example CVL's main library building or its hyper grid resource center would both be considered landmarks Whereas communities can span many spaces and are more their more activity in citizens of citizen focused Communities are less tangible. They host book discussions conferences parties things like that and they often use landmarks as Meeting spaces, but they aren't necessarily tied to one spot We anticipate the database will evolve as we build our current collections and acquire more right now We're focused on building the virtual world communities collection and maintaining and improving the virtual world landmarks collection But in the future, we would like to interlink collections For example, perhaps linking CVL's main library landmark entry to the entry in the the other collection for CVL Just their overall community landmark Other collections we might consider for the database in the future might be in archives for retired communities projects and Sims Biographies of important figures in virtual worlds images in machinima Published virtual worlds research and virtual world conferences like this one. Those would all be amazing Okay, so if building and maintaining the virtual worlds database sounds like a lot of work You are right and we need all the help that we can get This slide lists some of the volunteer positions and tasks that we need help with a fact checking might appeal to the investigators among us We need folks willing to visit communities and reach out to community leaders to make sure the information in the database is as accurate as possible And if you have cataloging or database entry experience, we're looking for a few people to help add entries to the database This would require a little bit more of a commitment and a free air table account so that we can give you permission to edit the database Air table being the platform that is hosting the database right now We'd also like to create or locate a virtual worlds glossary to advise the database and its users And it would require knowledge of controlled vocabularies and their applications if there's anyone that has that sort of experience We also need someone to investigate integrating the database into CVL's website. That would make it a lot easier for people to find and use And backups are another thing that we'd like to do. They're very important for migration Especially if we decide to stop using air table in the future or it becomes less which aren't able to use it for some reason We do currently have backup spreadsheets of the database. So we do have some backups right now. But encoding the spreadsheet in a language like XML would be very helpful if we wanted to integrate the database into HTML or if we wanted to to migrate it in the future. So there are a lot of database platforms out there and unfortunately many are very costly or they require extensive coding or other back end experience. So something else that we would love to find our people that just some long term IT volunteers interested in providing IT support and implementation implementations for CVL. Maybe someone that can help advise us on that side of things. And if you're not able to commit as a specialized volunteer there are lots of other ways that you can help us out. Take a moment to enter your favorite community or perhaps communities if you belong to quite a few or if you know of quite a few into our Google form. And I'll go ahead and I'll paste the link for that again. It is also on this slide but that way everyone has it. You can also check out the database and let us know if you have any issues. Is there something that's really confusing? Is something missing or incorrect? You can share the database link with others and recommend the database to colleagues interested in learning more about virtual worlds. And you can use the database for yourself. Browse to see what's out there or maybe look for specific types of communities. There's lots of different ways to search the database and to browse it as well and to narrow down categories. And if you have a blog you might find that the database gives you your next community or landmark that you'd like to feature. And finally if you have your own virtual world spreadsheet or database we would love to collaborate. So if you've been doing your own work that seems like it might mesh well with ours please contact us. We're open to discussing integration as well as partnerships especially with collections that highlight the educational aspects of virtual worlds and the professional aspects. And if you're interested in curating or helping with the database in any way please feel free to contact me or to contact Vow. There is a box in our gazebo exhibit for the conference that has CVL's logo on it. And if you touch that box or receive a note card with all of these CVL volunteer opportunities and then some for both the database and in general as well as our email addresses. So please feel free to reach out to us. And then finally please again feel free to check out the database. I have the link here. This slide gives us some instructions on how you might add things to the database. And I quote the average turnaround as about a week depending on the semester and how many people I have helping out it could be a little bit longer. But it is actively being looked at. I get an email every time somebody adds an entry and there was actually one very recently. I was very happy to see that. So we are paying attention. We are looking. And again if you see something that is not right and you'd like us to correct it please feel free to just shoot us an email. And we'd be happy to help with that. And so I'm going to go ahead and turn this over to Marie and she's going to talk about the digital citizenship exhibit. And maybe a few other things as well for you. Okay well thanks Elise that was great. I'm trying to get the slide set up here. Very good. Now one of the things I'm going to do here is I'm going to try and put down a copy of this object that Elise talked about that has, yes it worked. So if you can see this, this is the database form. If you click on it you should be able to go directly to the database to enter any of the communities that you would like. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to talk about the digital citizenship exhibit which was originally at CVL and we're in the process of moving it to Kitely. For CVL it was a temporary exhibit and it was so popular and we feel also that the subject matter is so important that it made sense to do a permanent exhibit. So what we're doing is we're actually have an island on its cookie in Kitely that will be just the digital museum. And the nice thing about it is we're taking each one of those exhibits that we was in second life and we're giving it a building in the new museum. So that people who want to can do whatever they want in terms of the exhibit so they can keep their slides in there but they can also add other objects that they would like that are associated with their exhibit. So what you see here is just kind of an example of two of them that I put together for demonstration purposes. Now we're hoping that this museum will be finished by mid to late January so that we can start having visitors. And the other nice thing is that it's also going to still have lots of space for people who are interested in adding content. So if there's anybody who would be interested in putting up an exhibit related to digital citizenship you can contact me and I will make a space for you to put up your exhibit. So this slide is just showing an example of a couple of exhibits that I put together for demonstration purposes. And you can see that in some cases it's just some images that go along on the wall. You can follow the presentation that way and in other cases there's some other objects like Mediana Prim and what have you that you can interact with. And that's basically it for the Digital Citizenship Museum. Please feel free to ask any of us any questions. Also go ahead and see if you can't get that form because we'd really like to get as many entries into our database as we can. Thank you. You know Maria I'm glad you mentioned that while you guys are setting up the next set of slides we had a couple questions come in. And one of them was for these objects and for the content you're putting in there will you be cataloging Creative Commons content? And do you need any help? That's from Lisa Laxton. That's a good question. I'm going to give that to Val. Certainly yes we are cataloging Creative Commons licensed material where we definitely want to advocate and be role models for digital citizenship and respect for intellectual property certainly. And so yes we are definitely open to volunteers. You do not have to be an information professional to help the community virtual library. Just as in the physical world libraries and librarians rely on volunteers to come in and help with all kinds of different projects. So you're welcome to contact any of the three of us. If anything we've talked about sounds of interest to you working on exhibits displays we're going to have more space on our new land library land in Second Life on Cookie Island for exhibits art galleries pop up exhibits. And then also on Kitely as Marie was telling you about our digital citizenship exhibit that will cover all elements of digital citizenship from how to evaluate online content. We also remain cyber safe cyber safety also online identity protection privacy and as you mentioned respect for intellectual property really anything that people need to understand as we now live most of the time in digital culture. That's promoting digital citizenship. So if you know that really affects everybody. So there's a lot of different ways that you can help with the digital citizenship exhibit by bringing in various things that that you work on in virtual worlds. And I also asked questions and I also wanted to add to that Val that we're also it's also digital literacy too. So that's the whole that whole idea of how you find it how you find the content that you need without it and put in incorporating it into your own work without plagiarism without plagiarism and and making sure that it's actually good work. It's not it's not fake news. Right now this next question and it's Lisa Laxton's question and delightful do angle has a spin off of it as well. Both of them are thinking about an external database. And of course delightful first says is your development effort aligned with the American Library Association Association of Research Libraries National Archives or or some other collection. Absolutely. We are we are affiliated with the ACRL group of the American Library Association. We have librarians who convene the group. It's the ACRL Association of College and Research Libraries and we are a member interest group. We're called the Virtual World Interest Group. So we are definitely in collaboration with ALA. We also connect with colleagues really around the globe over with some of you may know Sheila Weber who's an information literacy specialist in the UK and we collaborate with her quite a bit as well. So we we really try to network with other librarians and with the information literacy standards as they have changed. They have changed to include meta literacy and that aligns well with virtual worlds. Well that's great. So Lisa's spin off question is, is there any interest in integration with a separately maintained knowledge base? We'll have to give that some thought and Elise you might even Elise has kind of taken on the lead as far as our virtual world database and we're open to this growing and to networking with others. And so I'm certain if we find we've already found several professionals who have shared what they've gathered from you know from spreadsheets and from various collections. So we would be open to partnering you know with our virtual world database in any way and Elise feel free to add to that. Yeah, sure. I know for on what you were just saying about people that have I know I believe I have one of one of my missions for my winter break from classes. I'll be graduating next semester so it'll be my last official winter break is that Beth Ghost Raven had actually given us at one point a really great spreadsheet that I need to go through and add to the database. And then as far as integrating. I'm not entirely sure what you mean by integrated knowledge management. Other than because I'm doing a lot with like digital asset management and stuff like that but I'm not sure if if you're thinking along those lines or if it's something else that I'm not understanding for. Well, we could take that offline and for further discussion after the session. We had another housekeeping question too. I don't mean to interrupt your slides by any means but I was giving you time to get set up for the third set. But this comes from JJ Eaton versus Drinkwater who says how will landmarks be checked for currency? Is there a way not to have to check them by hand like do you plan on using a bot or some other method? For that that's actually a really good question. That's a very difficult question also because I know that there's been a lot of research in preserving worlds where bots don't always work due to various permissions issues. Right now a lot of it just has to do with going in and checking by hand but we do have a section at least on the back end that it may be added to the front end as well at some point where I have a way of dating when it was last checked. So someone can go in at the very least and see okay so this was last checked a year ago that sort of thing. So I'm looking at the various but so that's something it definitely requires a little bit more research into ways to do that and that's something also where we had some IT volunteers or folks that had experience using bots to check things they could. Sometimes that costs some money but that doesn't mean that we're opposed to applying for grants and that sort of thing. I hope that answers the question. Oh yeah that's great thanks and I'll turn it back over to you for the rest of your session. Well we will mention that you know as we said we do rely heavily on our volunteers. We have a head reference librarian who trains them and so that is one of the ways we have office hours and it's if each person even just spends an hour you know in the community virtual library. Once a week just you know in the library that gives a little time to look through the database maybe check a landmark. So that's one way is through our office hours we rely on volunteers. We also have a library colleague who is researching artificial intelligence. So when you mentioned bots and the ability to use AI it's it's something that she might want to look into. She brought for one of our virtual world interest group meetings. She brought a robot avatar who was able to interact with the audience and she's definitely right at the edge of learning about AI and what possible jobs that AI might be able to help with. So you know that's a potential that we might look into to help us with this database because it's a real important need that could be filled. Great thank you and we had a comment come in from Gamisa saying that you could just use a script to do that you don't really need a bot. Just a script that goes around and check so so there's other options there to over to you. Well let's see were there any other questions that we missed in the chat where we basically wanted to just make you all aware of the virtual world database. Make you aware of the community virtual library and hopefully you found that we are our main branches in Second Life but we are definitely moving to to other grids. And I will put our website in the text chat. I mentioned it but I'd like to put it in the text chat because if you follow our website you'll you'll see our grand opening tours and also find out some information about the call for proposals for our digital citizenship exhibit. We're going to be using collaborative tools for the digital citizenship exhibit so if anyone if that sounded interested to anyone you'll need to contact Marie Vance. She's going to be our lead curator for the digital citizenship exhibit. Yes and I just put the put my email address in there so if anybody is interested and would like to. You know we could use volunteers as well as people interested in just putting up putting up content in in the in the space so please feel free to contact me to to get involved. Well that's great. So it looks like we have another question from Connie. What was the name of the person who had the list of educational Sims? Oh you're talking about Fleet Took. Yes, yes. Any other questions? We have one coming in from Sunbeam Magic who says for digital citizenship will there be some type of passport or ID given out? I guess I'm not sure Val do you do you. I can mention one thing about that. When I was a school librarian we my entire school was certified as a digital citizenship campus. There is a great site and Marie's familiar with this. The there are sites where schools and children can be certified you know with passports for digital citizenship. And so we'll definitely look into that there may be a way that we could we can create a passport for a for a virtual world digital citizen. And is it is that meaning that that somebody has met the requirements of knowing what being a good digital citizen is? Yes, I know there are there are several different ways to go about doing that. We could even embed that somewhere in our digital digital citizenship exhibit where there's certain key elements that you know with maybe someone has to master a certain a certain thing to actually achieve their their passport. Maybe even and this will be a growing thing. We don't plan for this to be just you know instant. We'd like this to be a permanent exhibit that grows and we add on and I could see possibly having various badges even that you could earn a cybersecurity badge. A privacy badge, you know, or and the initial thing would just be your passport to go through or something. It could be a levelized a levelized learning experience. Yes, and we and we could we could use some help with that too for people who know how to put it get together experiences like that. Thank you. Now we had two questions come in from Sun Tzu and I tried to put them in the chat. The first one is, do you find that people use digital libraries differently than real life libraries? And secondly, what things do you do with them to make them more effective? I can take a little bit of this question, although Val and Marie are actually a little bit more qualified than me. I'm happy to take at least part of it because I recently did. I was spoke at a conference on the subject where I was talking about for librarians at physical libraries versus introducing them to virtual world libraries and what the differences and how they might be able to use virtual worlds in place of VR or as a way of practicing on VR. And so I actually have a presentation that is downloadable through the Internet Librarian website that talks all about it. But for some of them, having worked in public libraries before being able to sit at a reference desk is actually very similar. Currently, it's not as busy as it once was. And so that's where it's a little bit different. But there are other ways that it's very similar in terms of people being able to come in and ask you any question. Biggest difference being that it's a little bit more anonymous, which can be a little scary sometimes, but you also have the ability to ban them if they are actually inappropriate. So that's one of those interesting differences. And then the content is very different because we do have some books and we love to be able to link to places online like the Gutenberg project. However, it's also very different in that we have these sorts of efforts where we've taken communities as resources. We've realized that resources for a virtual library isn't necessarily books and the physical resources. It ends up being the communities that we're trying to serve just as much as giving them landmarks. It's also important for them to know. This brings to mind another question. You're probably familiar with the educator resources like Merlot and Maricopa Learning Exchange, where 10, 15 years ago they tried to catalog learning objects and all kinds of resources for curriculum. And of course, we had the Educator Commons. Kay McLennan hosted it right before the conference began on Friday. And several of the educators who came, Bethany and others, were asking, will there be an archive or something in your library that will make it easy for them to find educator content for hosting their classes or like OARs, IARs, and then also some information that is attached to that so they know how to use it. Yes, yes. I'll let Marie talk a little bit about the OAR files and the IR files. But first I wanted to mention that having worked in a library for over 25 years, I find amazing similarities in a virtual library. But there are also huge advantages. We can have live book discussions on a global scale. You can't do that in the physical world. We can have research symposiums without the high cost of travel. We can have live storytelling events. We recently partnered with Shoniki Library for the Dickens Project and brought people in for our research presentations on the Victorian era, doing that on a live scale. And that would be difficult to do in the physical world where you can actually go in, dress in the Victorian attire, and present your research all together live. Also, we can help people find open access materials that are available that are very difficult for them to find because the internet is just so vast. And we can help them find that. And it's a one-on-one service that it's just really difficult to do that in a physical library. There's a lot of time wasted wandering here and there in physical space. And here it's just you're right there immersed in it. And as Elise said, in our main library we have a lot of links to open access materials, links to the Gutenberg books that are copyright free. So there are just tremendous similarities to a physical world library. When you sit around together in a round table and discuss literature in a virtual world, it's very much like being in a physical world book group. So the similarities are quite amazing. And Marie, did you want to say anything about or files and archiving in that way? Yeah, but before I say that, talk about that. What I wanted to point out was in a bigger view of what a digital library is, I'm not a librarian. I come from a research point of view. So I use digital libraries online all the time when I'm doing research. And I find it a lot easier to find the things I need for my research online than if I go and walk into a library and look for it. And the reason why that is is because I feel like I have the skills that are needed to pull down content from the web. And this is because where I work, they subscribe to some of the major digital libraries. So I don't have a problem getting the materials that I need. Now, if I could walk into a library and get the same thing, it's not going to be nearly as convenient for me because I can just get it from my desk. So I feel like in that respect, digital libraries are way more convenient than brick and mortar libraries. Absolutely. We had one more little question. We only have 15 seconds. So the question is, can people contribute OARs and IARs to this educator part of the database? That comes from Sally, by the way. Oh, I think that would be great. We would love that. What you would have to do is just send us an email because you won't be able to easily submit it through our current spreadsheet. But yeah, send an email to all three of us or one of us. And yeah, we'll be able to start looking into that because, yeah, that's really helpful. Well, thank you, Elise Donovan Jones, Valerie Hill, and Marie Vans for a terrific presentation. As a reminder to our audience, you can see what's coming up on the conference schedule at conference.opensimulator.org. Now following this session, the next session will begin at 5.30 p.m. in this keynote region, and it is entitled, Libraries and Learning and Literacy, Oh My! Also, we encourage you to visit the OSCC-17 poster expo in the OSCC Expo 3 region to find the accompanying information on presentations to explore the HyperGrid tour resources in OSCC Expo 2 region, along with the sponsor and crowd funder booths located throughout all of the OSCC Expo regions. Thank you again to our speakers and to the audience.