Tim+Siftar

About me:

Reference Librarian at Drexel's Hagerty Library, Subject Specialist and Liaison for Drexel's School of Education, College of Information Science and Technology and the Goodwin College. I also head up Drexel Libraries Second Life Task Force where we are building out the western half of the Drexel Island.

The goals of the Drexel Libraries' SL project are to:
 * Experiment with using SL as another outreach or service delivery “channel”
 * Experiment with ways to use the VR-spatial dimensions toward teaching or information sharing goals,
 * Experiment with hosting synchronous meetings
 * Increase opportunities to support/ collaborate with faculty & staff
 * Learn more about gaming & network with others

The initial project of the Library has been to help Library Staff get familiar enough with the platform to support Drexel faculty efforts in SL. It is also to explore how our existing content on our website may be inhanced by presenting it using the the affordances of the SL platform. To that end we adopted the "pod, stem, leaf" arrangements JC Bradley uses for each academic department on the eastern half of Drexel Island. For the Library, each base "pod" will profile a librarian subject specialist and each "leaf" sprouting from the stem is devoted toward the [|"research guides"] that each librarian maintains on our website with research guidance for a particular discipline. Each leaf will host images of the most important research tools for that discipline, and serve as a container for whatever other tutorials and materials the librarians may have in the future. The expectation is that as faculty begin to teach on SL, they'll have the option to link into discipline-specific research guides within SL that direct students to appropriate resources in RL (real-life) and SL. Here's a picture of how we are getting started:



That's all for now! best, [|Tim Siftar]