ACRL-VWIG & ALA Virtual Communities in Libraries Program
October 15, 2017 12PM SLT   
 at the CVL Auditorium in Second Life

"Genealogy in Virtual Worlds"

presented by: Kilandra Yeuxdoux 

At this month's meeting Kilandra Yeuxdoux, a librarian and genealogist did a presentation on using Virtual Worlds for genealogy research.   Kilindra pointed out that many organizations in virtual worlds currently operate by setting up website launchers.  These sites allow people to do genealogy research independently by logging into specific collections.  These sites work like more traditional genealogical sites such as Ancestry.com.  People create accounts and then login to the collection/douments available there and proceed to do their own research.  Organizations such as Just Genealogy, The Humanity Biblioteca-Afterchills were two examples of places that use this research  model. Genealogy research requires access to information/documentation that is place bound and found only at a particular library or institution which may not be easily accessible to the researcher.  This is one of the aspects of genealogy research that makes it so time consuming and labor intensive.

Kilandra Yeuxdoux

Kilandra, who's been a Second Life user since 2006, proposed that one of the best things virtual worlds offer to genealogists is the ability to meet and work with people who may live in an area you are researching or who are physically close to, or have access to collections you need for doing your research. She called this research model "Collaboration Research".  This model of doing research collaboratively came out of medical school curriculum development.

Virtual worlds, and specifically, Second Life are ideally suited to cooperative research efforts.  They allow people who are geographically dispersed to meet together in a virtual space that they have access to at any time and from any location.  Working in virtual spaces collaboratively has a couple of benefits.  For one, virtual worlds provide a space where other researchers can assist you by retrieving information/documentation from those special libraries/collections to which you might not have ready access.  Another, perhaps more important benefit it brings is that it provides skilled researchers a space where they can work together and help one another with their specific research needs.  Adding other skilled researchers to the mix greatly facilitates the often-times tedious process of doing genealogy research.

While commercial services such as Ancestry.com already function as places researchers can go to access actual data, Kilindra suggests that Virtual worlds, specifically Second Life,  are great places for researchers to meet and share information.  She posited that this role may wind up being more important for researchers.  She encouraged researchers using Second Life and other virtual worlds to  strive to create an information commons for other researchers who are developing or bringing information to an informal conversation.