America's Next Top Information Professional

So, I’ve been having some technical difficulties which have kept me from getting too deep into Second Life. Until that gets cleared up, I wanted to try out some other virtual worlds. So, I started an account on Whyville, an educational world aimed at kids. (The Wikipedia article gives some context about the background: Whyville was started in 1999 by a company started by some folks from CalTech, and currently has about 5 million users.)

My interest in virtual worlds for kids was piqued by Eric Meyers’ presentation for National School Library Day about his research into these spaces. It was easy enough to create an account, and get my avatar all set up. There was no problem with my being an adult — I could still pick “student” and even pick “college” as my grade. In order to get my “Chat Certificate,” I had to answer some questions about appropriate use of chat — that is, if anyone asks my address, I need to click the 911 button to alert the authorities. (Eric had mentioned this sort of safety feature built into other worlds, so it was interesting to see it in action.)

Apparently it is flu season in Whyville as well. The homepage has an extensive description of the WhyMe and WhyFlu flus that are going around, even including a report summarizing the number of infected folks. Even though I doubt these flus can be fatal, I decided to get vaccinated anyway.

That’s me in the bottom left. It’s funny that it cost me five clams, though — I don’t completely understand the economy yet, but I don’t have a job yet. The only way I can make money is by playing games, I think.

You can also see at the bottom of that image that there’s a link to “City Records.” Be still, my archivist heart! I clicked on that link, and up popped a search box: fill in any user name, and you can get information about that person. So I put in myself (hova09) and this is what came up:

So, it’s more like a telephone directory, but at least it plants the idea of public records, eh?

I also played around in a virology lab. It was timely — just last night at dinner, a question had come up about what viruses are, and how they live…or just exist and reproduce. In the Whyville virus lab, you can design vaccines…but also viruses themselves. I found the games a bit obscure — you basically try to design a virus using colored squares — the more closely the colors you pick match the colors of the avatar you’re trying to infect, the better you do. It struck me as creepy, to be perfectly honest. Virtual bioengineering? But the tutorial about viruses was not bad:

It’s all self-paced, very simple, just images and text, no audio component.

In order to have a well-rounded experience, I wanted to check out some beaux arts in Whyville. Luckily, the Getty Institute has a presence, so I stopped by to see the goods. And I have to say, it’s amazing to see a Cezanne framed by neon purple and green.

You can blow up the image, by the way, but you can’t lose the border. There are prolific links to the Getty website. I tried to do an art treasure hunt, but it didn’t seem to have been completed.This disappointed me, especially because I could have earned 50 clams, easy.

I had a hard time getting anyone to talk to me. There was a lot of whispering going on — only one person said hello to me, and then she disappeared. Sometimes it’s lonely being an avatar.

Ahhhh, the panopticon. Who doesn’t love it, or at least love talking about it? I remember first reading a chapter or two from Foucault as an undergrad in Jim Kincaid’s legendary Thematic Option course on deviance. (This would’ve been, incidentally, about the same time that I first joined facebook.)

Now, in my LIBR 559M course at UBC, we’re turning our eyes to surveillance in social media. In this article, Anders Albrechtlund discusses “participatory surveillance,” where folks use online social networking to maintain friendships and otherwise empower themselves. He makes some intriguing points, but first I need to take issue with some relatively minor details.

The first is a misrepresentation of the potential for digital preservation. Albrechtlund states, “It is said that true friendships last forever, however, in the case of online social networking this sentiment gets a completely different meaning. The digital trails of an online friendship – true or not – really do last forever, since they are stored indefinitely on servers.” Although this may be the best thing to think before you post a scandalous photo to your blog, the fact is, plenty of digital information gets lost. Who owns those servers Albrechtlund mentions? Maybe the company will go under. Maybe the servers will crash. Maybe the program used to access that data will fall into disuse. Casual statements like Albrechtlund’s perpetuate a false sense of security that digital information is effortlessly permanent. The effort and money put into projects like InterPARES, LOCKSS and the ERA are proof that digital records and information are not necessarily as long-lasting as we would like.

Next. In discussing danah boyd’s work on social networkings, Albrechtslund mentions searchability, stating that, “The almost instant access to things the searcher is looking for does make a difference compared to the slow process of “digging out” what he or she wants to find.” Woah woah woah. Certainly many kinds of searching are much faster and easier online, but again this misrepresents the state of the information universe. Some kinds of information remain buried in databases or archaic language or on paper. Research will always require a certain amount of “digging out,” whether that means flipping through a card catalog OR evaluating a gazillion hits from Google. While it is important to celebrate the successes of online searching, it is imperative to think critically about what has not been and perhaps cannot be retrieved online.

Combined, these two misconceptions present a world where all information about you is accessible to anyone, forever. No wonder some view the online realm as a panopticon, a tool for social control.

This week in our course one of our tasks is to examine the 2.0 suffix, and to think about the potential benefits and risks of applying it to libraries, archives, museums, or other heritage institutions.

One of the problems I have with the 2.0ization of everything is its roots in capitalism and consumption. In Michael Casey’s and Laura Savastinuk’s guide to Library 2.0, they actually begin with Business 2.0, and use a tonne of business examples (whether Amazon or eBay) throughout the book. Something like the long tail is definitely a valuable concept for librarians and archivists to understand, but it is rooted in supply and demand. I read Casey and Savastinuk’s book a while back while writing a paper for ARST 540, and re-reading a chapter this week makes me think I need to revisit the rest of the book. I found they never really gave a satisfying statement of how Library 2.0 differed from these money-making 2.0s. I hope this doesn’t sound naive — I don’t mean that libraries cannot participate in the economy, it just unsettles me when we don’t examine our role in it.

Just to give a non-library example: I had the pleasure of hearing Patricia Williams speak a few years back, and she mentioned that her 13-year-old son had just created a Myspace page. Once she discovered this, she promptly dismantled it, both because he was a minor and her permission had not been sought and on top of the risk for data-mining. But she also expressed concern for identity formation on corporate sites like this. She puzzled over all of those quizzes: when you pick what kind of gangsta or which Golden Girl you are from a quiz provided on a website with financial interest in your demographics…is that really freely forming identity? Just the fact that it was called “Myspace” suggests the trap of consumer culture: you are given certain superficial choices (purple background or red?), rather than being encouraged to make significant choices.

This is an oversimplification, and Myspace is hardly an exemplary forum of participatory culture, but these kinds of concerns need to be addressed, especially when public institutions start getting in on the fun.

While I wait for Vista to load (I’ve been having serious technical issues with my old workhorse iBook G4), here’s a little story. In our assignment for Dean’s class for this week, we’ve been instructed to dip into a variety of social media tools and report. I’ve already been using Google reader, flickr, Twitter, and del.icio.us for a while, so my plan had been to try other products (e.g. Bloglines). However, this evening, my darling roommate asked me, unbidden, to explain how Twitter works so I thought I’d post the highlights of our conversation here.

Basically, I explained that Twitter is a form of microblogging: you write statements of 140 characters or fewer, which are posted to a sort of list. You can follow other people’s tweets, which means that you will see their posts interspersed chronologically with your own — and other folks can follow your tweets, too. (You can also restrict this.)

She said that was more or less what she thought, she just wasn’t quite sure how you do it, or what it looks like. We talked a bit about trending topics, the range of users, and some of the ways that Twitter has been used, such as during the protests in Iran. In a much smaller scale, I learned about Michael Jackson’s death on Twitter, a good hour before it was reported by the New York Times.

I’ve been using Twitter since about December of last year, and I have to say I remain amazed at how much people hate on it. Repeatedly, I’ve been asked, exasperatedly, what “the point” is. This points to a disappointing truth about affordance: some people will just not want to see the possibilities of any given tool. As librarians and archivists, we certainly have colleagues who have been resistant to various new technologies, from descriptive standards to OPACs. I’m not saying that we need to accept everything that comes our way, but open-mindedness tends to make things more interesting. However, on a personal level, if Twitter doesn’t work for you, don’t use it. It really is as easy of that.

*I overheard someone say this in the library where I worked this summer. The answer is: heck yeah, girl!

Howdy, folks.

My name is Kelly, and I’m a third-year student in the joint Masters of Library and Information Studies and Masters of Archival Studies program at the School of Library, Archival, and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia. Or, the MLIS/MAS program at SLAIS at UBC, for short.

So, I’ve had blogs before, starting with a livejournal account with a dreadful color scheme, way back as a first-year undergrad. But it’s a new school year, and a perfect time for a new blog, this time special for my LIBR 559 course, which is focused on social media for information professionals.

I’ll leave you with a link to Catherine O’Sullivan’s 2005 Calvin Pease award-winning article, Diaries, On-line Diaries, and the Future Loss to Archives; or, Blogs and the Blogging Bloggers Who Blog Them. She has an intriguing argument about how blogs form personal “papers,” and the issues involved in longterm preservation of ’em. (From American Archivist, vol. 68, no. 1.)