But it is not all playing around ... : Consumer health & Education & Clinical and Research

The Second Life Medical Library is focussing on three main targets: 1. Consumer Health Information : a special Consumer Health Library will be build and the project manager Carol Perryman (with colleagues) will map all excisting Support Groups in Second Life, and do a special outreach program, to improve Health Information transfer in a broad sense. Currently we already have been abled to track down a long list of Support Groups. It is for this project that the Central Medical Library of the University Medical Hospital Groningen in the Netherlands is official participant and I am dedicating some time. More on this project later! It will be the most important project the Second Life Medical Library will focus on. 2. And we want to do the same for any Educational, Clinical or Research activities related to Health or Medical subjects that take part in Second Life. Many Academic organisations are stepping in or thinking about it. Have a look at www.simteach.com! Sl offers a lot of simulation power. Already there are thoughts of developing CME, offering services to special educational groups. There are plans for a Virtual Hospital. The Medical Library can offer help and support in getting the right resources & information needed. We can offer meeting space and special programs for the exchange of information. 3. Experiment and development of new ways of interaction between users and libraries. With open minded people who are willing to invest time to try to improve library services in general and really learn what user want & need. Already we have a portable (well, in fact Head-Up Display) searchTool that can search Second Life Library , Second Life stuff itself but also special web resources, such as WorldCat, Google, Amazon ... Library Tours can be selfservice by means of a tool like Chatfeeder that users carry with them. They can read e-books, listen to audio-books and look at streaming video. We have RSS-feeds visually displayed. We can search PubMed in Second life, offer Reuters health News. Our virtual Reference Desk is using QuestionPoint and we are training a Chatbot to talk to people when we are not there, for some reason. And this is just the beginning. Some people go fishing ......