Talis and the Alliance Library System have just issued a joint press release, announcing their work together to extend and enhance current Info Island/ Second Life Library capabilities through the establishment of a brand new island inside the virtual world; Talis Cybrary City. As regular readers will know, the East Peoria, IL-based Alliance Library System recently won second prize in the first global Mashing up the Library Competition; a prize they accepted on behalf of all their partners in the ongoing international effort to bring meaningful library services to over a million residents of Second Life.

Here you can see me just prior to the announcement, floating in front of the new main building. Over to my right you can see the shiny tower in which I (TalisPaul Fossil in-world, in deference to Second Life’s slightly quirky system for naming ‘avatars’) and others such as Jenny Levine will soon be setting up and staffing offices.

Earlier this week, I floated very close to this spot and watched as a robot moved across open ocean, extruding new land from the water as the sun rose in the distance. Definitely surreal. Construction moves forward at a remarkable pace, with a number of buildings already up and their occupants preparing to take up residence. Further buildings are to follow, in a plan that will see the island filled in short order.

It is intended that Cybrary City will fulfil two main purposes, both somewhat different to the services already delivered by existing Second Life Library properties. Firstly, Cybrary City will offer services for librarians including a librarians’ library and training facilities suitable for teaching the delivery of Second Life services and for offering physically distributed groups an opportunity to come together to share their ideas and experiences. With Second Life already reaching a demographic with which many real world libraries report difficulty in engaging, and with techniques and practices tested here in Second Life liable to prove highly aposite as we seek to virtually deliver services from libraries in a growing number of online environments, this is surely to be broadly welcomed.

Secondly, Cybrary City will offer individual real world libraries a space of their own in Second Life within which they can offer information about themselves and their services. They might also wish to staff those spaces in order to offer their patrons a different mode of engagement.

At Talis, we’re keen to see the ways in which libraries make use of this new opportunity, both to deliver services but also to increase their understanding of alternative service channels. We’re also looking at the possibility of powering applications that link the physical and the virtual, leveraging the capabilities and web services-powered reach of Talis Platform components such as the Silkworm Directory, the bibliographic holdings stores behind the pretty skin of Project Cenote, and more. We’d welcome an opportunity to discuss this with libraries interested in exposing information about themselves, their holdings and their other services inside Second Life, and have set up a forum on the TDN for discussion of issues related to this.

Come on in and take a look around, whether with the intention of in-world service delivery, to better understand the possibilities raised by the next generation of environments that will undoubtedly follow Second Life, or just to join me sitting on the roof of the office tower, dangling our legs over the side and watching the world go by.

Technorati Tags: Cybrary City, Libraries, Library 2.0, MUTL06, secondlife, secondlifelibrary, Talis, Talis Platform