Have you ever played these games?

Susan has been looking at gaming for a chapter in her book. Wow. I was pretty clueless about what was going on in these virtual worlds. She's been playing Second Life. I knew that players bought virtual things like cool clothing or accessories with real money, but I had no idea that they bought real merchandise with real money. Home Depot has a store! According to Susan, "you browse the shelves, as you would an online catalog, pick out what you want and purchase with a credit card. Then it is sent to your house or you go to your local store to pick it up. Just another interface for e-commerce."


I'm trying to get my head around all of this. Susan's observation is that " the games are less games than just a virtual environment for socializing. Second Life has no game objective- it is just for socializing, e-commerce, virtual dating".

Future of the Book

Well, much to my amazement, I spoke for 15 minutes on Saturday about the "future of academic libraries". Hmmmm. Actually I dodged the bullet when it came to predicting the future and just talked about problems with no obvious solutions. Someone from the audience commented about how much he had gained by browsing the stacks of Stanford, Harvard, and New York Public. I couldn't think of a useful comment, other than to agree with him. Is anyone building a system that has browsability?

Carlson Library Study Break

We had such a fun time last Sunday night for the Carlson Library Study Break. There were zillions of students in the library; the line snaked out the door. They love getting a brown paper bag that they can fill with bags of chips and drinks and cookies, etc. It's great.

Cancerbaby

I always tell my colleagues that I read blogs so I can keep up-to-date, keep abreast of the latest developments, etc. etc. But I really started reading them because they were fabulous stories, but true (or at least I chose to think they're true). I loved Julie Julia and Chez Miscarriage. (Both have stopped blogging.) They made me laugh and cry. How strange to feel so connected to people that you've never met, will never meet, don't even know their names. I will miss Cancerbaby.

Check out alt ref blog

I really like this new blog, alt ref, by Brian Mathews at Georgia Tech. In this entry, he made (I think) two really short videos about why students don't use the OPAC. We especially laughed when he showed an example of a URL link in the OPAC that doesn't lead to full text.... Duh.
We have some of those links and they make people CRAZY!!! Sometimes you get so close to the situation, you forget how completely nutty it is.