As a Systems Librarian at an academic library, I may seem an unlikely candidate for Reader's Advisory work. Yet recently I became involved virtually — through building a Mystery Manor in Second Life.
Mystery Manor exists as a 3D representation of a Victorian house on the Alliance Library System's Info Island in the virtual reality world of Second Life. The mission of Mystery Manor is to promote the mystery genre to the residents of Second Life. How many virtual residents, you ask? Second Life has over 9 million uniquely named residents with approximately 1.5 million signing on within a 60-day period. These residents come to Second Life from over 100 countries. The Gartner Group estimates that by 2011 four out of five Internet users will use one of the growing number of virtual reality worlds. [Gartner press release, 4/24/2007, http://www.gartner.com/it/page.jsp?id=50361]
Much of our effort at Mystery Manor has been geared toward developing stand-alone resources to assist readers and potential readers of mysteries. To accomplish this, we use tools in- and outside of Second Life. Our Victorian house was prefabricated and required only unpacking it on our virtual plot of land. We picked several popular mystery sub-genres and assigned them to rooms within the house — Victorian, Hard-boiled, Gothic, Cozy, and Police Procedurals. Additionally, Mystery Manor features several galleries with rotating themes. While the rooms will contain permanent exhibits, the galleries will give us the opportunity to "refresh" the displays in Mystery Manor and give repeat visitors something new view. The galleries will feature visual and textual presentations including posters of books and authors as well as bibliographies, biographies, and articles. Our prototype exhibit, Cats in Mysteries, is in one of these gallery areas.
Creating resource materials is actually much easier in Second Life than it would be in real life. For example, you can upload an image - a book cover, for example - and turn it into a poster in minutes. Using a Second Life script, you can embed descriptive note cards that display when a visitor clicks on the poster. Text and images can be combined on a page. A poster of an author might provide the visitor with a short biography of the author and a list of works by that author. You can even create a more elaborate presentation of virtual books, where visitors can virtually page through books. Other tools and utilities launch a browser page to resource material on the Internet.
We are currently exploring how to integrate non-Second Life tools into our exhibits. We now have Mystery Manor accounts on del.icio.us and Google Docs. We add bookmarks in del.icio.us and tag them with genre terms. Let me be more specific. Say we have a room dedicated to the cozy sub-genre. A visitor can click on an object that launches a browser, which in turn displays the del.icio.us bookmarks tagged "cozy." And genre bibliographies? We're using Google Doc to create them. Here again, a visitor clicks on an object which opens a browser window and presto, there's the bibliography. We also use the Create Commons filter in Flickr to find images to illustrate mystery genres.
With all of these tools, our goal is to provide visitors with something they can take away: a virtual book or note card; a URL to bookmarks or even documents. The advantage of linking to Internet tools such as del.icio.us and Google Docs is that Mystery Manor staff only have to maintain the bookmarks and documents in one location. Since the visitors in Second Life are accessing the original bookmarks or documents they are always get the most current version, no reprinting necessary.
At present, the Mystery Manor bibliographies simply list authors and their works that fit a mystery sub-genre. As we expand our title lists, we plan to include read alike references: if you like culinary mysteries then you might also enjoy these mysteries set in a tea room or a coffee house.
We now have the capability of providing visitors with very detailed descriptions of authors and works that fall within the general category of mystery. The challenge remains how to draw visitors. There are several ways of resolving this issue. Second Life has a search function in which you can list discussions and exhibits. We have had participants in book discussions who learned of them through an events posting. In addition, independent newspapers are published in Second Life and cultural events can be publicized through those venues. Authors and publishers are moving into Second Life along with everyone else; and a significant number of book discussion groups are now active. We plan to explore publicizing in these areas as well.
What will tomorrow's reader's advisory look like? Whatever form it takes, you can bet a big part of it will be online. I encourage you to consider and explore the possibilities. Second Life provides an interesting opportunity to experiment with alternate methods of providing readers' services in an increasingly networked world.
Mack Lundy is Systems Librarian in the Swem Library at The College of William and Mary in Williamsburg, VA. In Second Life he is Max Batra. He can be contacted at malund@wm.edu.