This week I had the opportunity to attend the De Lange Conference. The program included some very big thinkers in scholarly communication and the future of libraries. There was not a lot of breaking news here for anyone familiar with the discourse of scholarly publishing, institutional repositories or Library 2.0, but it was exciting to hear about it directly from the leaders and policy makers. Collectively, their message was that libraries need to engage with the digital future and do it FAST if they want to remain relevant.
The conference was supposed to be simulcast in Second Life, and I looked over a colleague’s shoulder as he got started using SL.
The good:
- Unlike a traditional webcast, you can see the other participants around you, and chat as a group or IM individual participants privately. It provided a sense of community that I thought was very cool.
- While we were getting oriented, someone’s shirtless avatar materialized in front of us, break danced for a moment and then inquired “Er du Dansk?” Priceless.
The bad:
- Danish break dancers aside, SL seems like a spectacularly inefficient way to deliver content. The environment took a painfully long time to render on a wireless connection, we had difficulty finding the venue (a publicity problem, not a SL problem per se), and when we got there the audio and video weren’t working.
- Everyone in SL looks like either a gigolo or Aeon Flux.
I’ll be curious to see what happens with SL in the near future. I don’t think it’ll gain a wide following for professional/educational applications like this conference until it overcomes some of its present limitations. I don’t just mean having the media working properly. We were greeted by someone named Vulva Vella the moment we entered the orientation space, and although she seemed perfectly nice I can’t imagine introducing her to most of my colleagues.
