As part of our continuing process of improving our area on info island international we’ve been adding some things and changing others, some of these may be obvious but others may not:

1) We’ve added a ground level sitting area for people who stop by. While we do have the deck it’s not heavily used. This addition has the advantage of at least pulling conversations off to one side of the welcome area.

2) The walls and desk are being adjusted to give a more open feel to the area and to visually direct visitors to local resources.

3) Our new shift schedule board is in the process of being automated so it will be able to read directly from the google calendar.

4) A new intersim teleporter pad has been added to provide a direct portal to the five core sims in the Archipelago. It’s a flexible device so it will be able to have destinations added for special events as they happen.

5) The plot description for the desk has been updated to provide the search engine with more hooks and to make it easier for patrons to find us.

Whew, that’s all for now. I’ll keep you all updated as things evolve.

Griefing 101, Jan. 19 @ 6pm SLT

Reference meeting, Jan. 26 @ 4pm SLT

Reference training, Jan. 27th @ noon SLT

As we discussed at the last reference meeting we’ve added a schedule board to the reference desk on Info Island International. The board is a web enabled gadget that allows me to change the messages remotely. Each day it will list that day’s hours of coverage. It will not be listing either days in the future or who is on each shift. However, if you click the schedule board it will link directly to the google calendar. Hope this helps and meets with everyone’s needs. -Hypatia

We’ve got a prototype of a teleport map table set up on the small reference desk on Info Island. You can get to locations on the island by right clicking on any of the colored balls and choosing ‘teleport’. The four neighboring sims can be reached by clicking (left click) the table edge and then choosing ‘teleport’ from the map.

We’re going to add a second part that provides an intersim teleport to the major info islands. That’s forthcoming this week.

Try it out and let me know what you think.

We’ve been offered a custom browser toolbar to assist in virtual reference.  A large number of RL libraries use these to assist on the desk by organizing resources. If you’d like to give it a try the toolbar can be downloaded at:

http://vreference.ourtoolbar.com/

Some questions we get over and over again. In an analog library these are mostly “where’s the bathroom?”, “how do I work the copier?”, and questions about finding certain common resources. We learn these fairly quickly and most libraries have a file of those questions and their answers to help staff members. We currently lack this and we need  to fix it by finding out what the questions are and putting together a set of stock answers.

Here are some common ones which come to mind:

1) Where is X (where x=a specific resource or location) on Info Island. (We should probably put together a set of notecards with embedded landmarks for this).

2) How do I volunteer to help? (hmmm….I really need to do a notecard on that)

3) How do I make money in Second Life? (we have a card but it probably needs an update)

4) How do I open a box?

5) Why is this box on my head?

6) How do I stop dancing? (If you’re on Info International have them click the big purple thing at the desk)

Hello everyone and welcome to ‘Reference in a Virtual World’, the shiny new blog of the online virtual references services offered on the Information Island Archipelago. We’ve created this blog to provide a public forum for announcements and discussions about reference services offered in Second Life.