23rd January 2007, 05:21 pm by Richard Wallis In: Uncategorized

SirsiDynix Sponsors Alliance Library System’s Second Life Library 2.0; will fund the two main islands in the Info Island project on Second Life

The two Second Life islands sponsored by SirsiDynix are Info Island and Teen Info Island, which is named “Eye4YouAlliance.”

Having been involved with Second Life an Alliance Libraries for some time [Alliance Second Life Library won the second prize in the Talis Mashing Up The Library competition in august last year. Talis also sponsors Cybrary City another island in Second Life adjacent to Info Island, where approximately 30 public and academic libraries are represented and Talis have a virtual office.] it is great to welcome another member of the vendor community in to this virtual world.

Gaining this welcome further sponsorship, in addition to that so far provided by Talis, will add power to the elbow of the Alliance team, who are doing sterling work in promoting and sharing innovation for libraries in both Second Life and Teen Second Life.

Securing sponsorship for Info Island in particular, where the competition winning Second Life Library is located, I’m sure is very welcome to them.

It will be interesting to see the thoughts of Stephen Abram, Sirsi Dynix’s well known representative in the blogosphere, on Second Life after this announcement.

Update:
Stephen Abram, as expected, was not long in commenting on the anouncement:

I’ve been keeping this under my hat for so long I could burst. SirsiDynix is so excited about Second Life that we’ve taken to sponsoring a few of our clients there. Watch for the February issue of SirsiDynix OneSource where I’ll have an article all about this - complete with cool links. I am getting the same feeling about SL that I got about the web in 1994….

Short, but to the point.

As I have said before, on certain aspects of Second Life, I agree with Stephen that what we are seeing today could well be the begining of something as radical as the Web when it started.

Whilst waitng for the cool links to appear in OneSource next month, you might enjoy the the Second Life article by Kity Pope - Executive Director, The Alliance Library and our very own Paul Miller, in the just released Issue 5 [pdf] of the excellent [and I am not just saying that because it is published by Talis] Panlibus magazine.

Technorati Tags: Talis, Second Life, Libraries, SirsDynix