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Travels into Several Remote Digital Realms of the World
PART I: A Voyage to Libraryland

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Location: Champaign, Illinois, United States

2006-05-01

End of Semester Update

With the launch of Musematic I can get back to writing about my ongoing adventures as an LIS student. There's only a few more days left in the semester and I'm busy wrapping up final projects.

This morning I finished our group report that analyzed metadata workflows at our local public broadcasting station, WILL. The PBCore working group just released a draft schema that seems like it will be well suited to both WILL's capabilities and the need to record information specific to the audio-visual content they create. But like other standards based on Dublin Core, it's only part of the picture. I'm actually finding WILL's metadata environment not all that different than some of the museums I've worked with - distributed metadata creation by curators/producers largely driven by their own needs, systems designed to do one thing well being leveraged to do something totally different. They have a good foundation to start with, and with a little guidance and planning can make significant improvements in their current workflows.

I've created a second prototype for a virtual gallery in Second Life based on Roman collections at the Spurlock Museum's and with the help of David MacCaullay's City: A Story of Roman Planning and Construction. I decided to pass on some of the more complex scripting required to create a more interactive gallery for the moment. Just like building a real exhibit, building in a virtual world also takes careful planning and development of a good script. It was outside the scope of the assignment to go that far, but I did find a good example in the Pot Healer Adventure. PHA is a Myst-like puzzle game built inside of SL that could be a model for a museum artifact based adventure. I haven't been able to find out too much about its development, but it uses some fairly complex scripting that would require a good programmer (or more time than I had to become a good Lindenscripter) to pull it off. But it demonstrates that it is possible to do in SL. I also started a "Museums in Second Life" group, if you're a SL citizen you can look it up under Find->Groups.

Stay tuned for the update on my Knowledge Representation paper that explores part-whole relationships in museum artifact descriptions.

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