— I'm Timothy Greig. I live in Wellington, New Zealand, and work
for AIM Proximity. I'm interested in game design, information architecture, librarianship, and transmedia storytelling. Updates? — Try the RSS.

I’ve just finished up a round of lectures for INFO525, our ‘Intro to Technology‘ course in the Information Studies Programme. Our programme has a significant distance component – which for this paper means that each lecture is given three times:

• on campus for students studying here at Kelburn (Monday afternoon),
• online via audio conferencing for students all over New Zealand (Monday evening),
• and via telephone to a group of students who meet at Auckland City Library (Thursday evening).

It’s the second time I’ve taught for this paper, but teaching in the course this time around really got me thinking about how really different the three lectures are to teach – each with their own advantages and challenges. (more…)

Today I visited my very first Digital Media Design class: the wonderfully talented people from DMDN285, Game Theory.

Doug Easterly, the course coordinator, invited me to say a few words to the students who are just beginning group projects in which they will work together to create their own original flash videogame title. (more…)

I have begun seeking participants to help out in my research into Second Life Library. Basically, I’m looking for a whole range of different people – including casual Second Life Library visitors, librarians who work in Second Life, and those who are librarians in RL – anyone would like to share their thoughts, opinions, experiences, and expectations concerning the various libraries that are being developed on Info Island. (more…)

I (finally) submitted my proposal for my 580 Research project a couple of weeks ago. Part of the most daunting bit of my study towards the Masters of Library and Information Studies programme at Victoria University, my project is titled “Virtual World Libraries: Challenges and Strategies”. In brief, the research explores three questions:

1. What challenges faced by traditional online library services/interfaces are able to be overcome by Virtual World Library environments?
2. What new challenges (or old ones) face the development of Libraries in Virtual Worlds?
3. How might these challenges be overcome? Can the design strategies used in Massively Multiplayer Online Games be a useful guide?

When talking about “Virtual World Libraries”, I am referring to initiatives such as the Info Island Libraries now being run in Second Life, spearheaded by the Alliance Library System. I’m planning that my research will involve interviews with a few the users of these libraries, to learn about their experiences of the online library environment. Here’s an excerpt (more…)

For the next two trimesters (from February through till November) I’ll be working on a research project as part of my Masters in Library and Information Studies.

The INFO580 project is a compulsory part of our LIM training. It’s an opportunity for students to explore a topic of interest to us that relates to library and information management, and to apply the theories and principles we’ve learned over our past year or so of study in a research setting.

I submitted the Topic Approval Form for my project last Sunday, outlining my proposed topic of research:

[My] project seeks to develop a framework for the ways in which game design and e-learning theories might inform the future design and development of library interfaces within virtual world environments by considering an example of an emerging online library, the Second Life Library, and the experiences of users and virtual librarians using the service.

I’m hoping to produce something really worthwhile with this project, something that can be of use to those working to build virtual world libraries in the future. My next task is to produce a full formal proposal for my topic (due May 7th) – a clearer, longer version of my original TAF. I imagine that my supervisor, Brenda Chawner, and I will be working out the exact details of the project over the next week or so, and then my days will be filled with the likes of annotated bibliographies, tightly worded topic statements, clearly defined objectives, and human ethics proposals! (more…)

Emulation has become an important issue for librarians and archivists seeking to store and provide access to computer systems for future generations of technology researchers. It is important to remember that also there exists a social and human context within which this software is used. This is especially visible with regard to video games. Not only does the text of a video game have the potential to be quite different each time the player interacts with it, but the experience of playing a video game can also often be quite social one. It is therefore beneficial to try to provide some account of the social and cultural context in which these games were played. The Gamer Feedback digital library project is an attempt to digitize for preservation this context, through recording oral narratives of ordinary people who played video games over the past two decades.

Creating a collection as a digital library allows for the possibility of providing access to the collection on the Internet. Additionally, with the right system implemented, there is the potential for gamers from other countries to submit their own audio narratives electronically to administrators to be included in the digital library.

More can be read about the genesis of the project on the initial project page which I created to discuss the project, people and terminology involved. You can also take a look at images of the project and of Greenstone on a flickr set I’ve created.
I worked on this project with a fellow MLIS Student, Rebecca Hale, as an assignment for our course on Digital Library Systems. Our assignment was to build a small demo collection (8-12 library objects) using Greenstone. This post is a slightly altered version of the short de-breif report I submitted as part of the course assessment. (more…)