Hi Guildies! The time-lost Ranganathan here, with an announcement.

All guild members are invited to the first annual Libraries and Librarians guild meeting at the 2009 Computers in Libraries conference in Arlington, VA. The meeting will be held at a restaurant TBA at lunchtime on Monday, March 30, 2009. We will all meet at 12:25 PM just inside the conference hotel doors (Crystal City Hyatt). Guild master Michael Porter (Librarette, et al.) will be there as well as other founding members of the guild including Craig Anderson (Melvil, Jacqulyn) and me, Dave Lisa (Ranganathan). The meeting will be combined with lunch at a local eatery!

If you are attending Computers in Libraries, please plan on attending this historic get-together!

LibrariesandLibrarians will be the name. (had to leave out the spaces as our Alliance side guild is using Libraries and Librarians).

I've been talking about it and planning for a couple months and now is the time. It will be up in a week or less. More details will follow on this thread.

Drop a Horde message on Aerie Peak to: LibsTauren if you are interested. (Also on as Librarette, Libraryman, Libraryrogue, Libraryep and LibraryHuntr on the alliance side).

If any of you would like to co-GM the Horde Guild side please tell me. We'll need active admins on that side and GMing there will get you mad props! :)

More details and "whys":
My hope is that having a guild for each faction on the same server
will help us reap a slew of rewards, from rep to trading and banking,
especially now that we have a fairly robust guild of lib folks here
already.

I know Arie Peak can be full sometimes, but that does come and go
quite a lot. And that server has a healthy collection of library
staff at this point. We have some good connections with some other
guilds and give everybody that joins up "gifts" that will help you get
a fast start.

The Libraries and Librarians guilds on Aerie Peak are just "for
library staff and their loved ones" though. We do talk shop on
occasion in a way that we would only talk shop with colleagues,
friends and family. We let family/significant others/even libs kids
in too because several of us are of the mind that WoW is a great way
to pull couples and families together through play. Every new member
posts their real name and where they work/who they are connected to so
there is some screening and additional accountability, which has
worked out really well for us.

At any rate, if it sounds good to your please check out the horde
LibrarieandLibrarians guild on Aerie Peak next week! If I'm not on
drop me an in-game mail anytime. LibsTauren (on the horde side of
Aerie Peak) and Librarette (on the Alliance side of Aerie Peak)

If you are new WoW and the thinking about starting an account and joining the guild, welcome!

Once you get started you will find plenty of helpful folks and will get a nice bunch of welcome gifts as well to give you a leg up. :)

However, we would like to ask you to consider doing this before you do sign up: WoW has a refer a friend program that gives really nice bonuses both to YOU, the new WoW player AND to the person you list (or refer) when you sign up. It doesn't give you spam or make you provide any more info other than the referral. And the bonuses your referral give can really end up helping not just you and the person you refer, but the guild at large.

More info:
https://www.worldofwarcraft.com/account/recruit-a-friend.html?ticket=ST-542443-5CMq4qCs4uSgDe10qzNU

I would like for anyone in the guild who would like a referral to please list the required WoW info here on this thread. Thanks all!

Michael

My blog post is here: http://www.libraryman.com/blog/2008/07/27/libraries-and-librarians-wow-guild-grows-photographic-evidence/

Pics are here too: http://www.flickr.com/photos/libraryman/sets/72157606395784851/ I'll be adding more shots to this periodically. That set will not just be guild shots though, any library gaming related shots I have and will take will go there.

In light of that, I made a Guild flickr group for us all to share our in game Guild related screen shots! W00t! Stick yours there too please!
http://www.flickr.com/groups/wowlibs/
That'll be the place for our Guild photo's.

What say you all of this? :)

Jason the Content Librarian posted this about WoW and Gaming and this Guild at:
http://www.jasoneiseman.com/blog/?p=260

Would you like to play a game?

As I mentioned in a post earlier this week, I’ve never really gotten into online virtual worlds like Second Life, and I’ve certainly never gotten into MPORGs (Multiplayer Online Roleplaying Games). However posts this week from Libraryman, The Shifted Librarian, and Terri at Creative InfoPro have piqued my interest.

Apparently there is now a Libraries and Librarians Guild in World of Warcraft (WoW).

The problem is that I’m not completely sure what the significance of that is. Libraryman suggests that this guild may help newcomers to WoW overcome the steep learning curve, which has been a barrier to my participation in MPORGs. Terri at Creative InfoPro suggests another game called Entropia Universe which I’d never heard of but looks pretty interesting. I’ve also seen some chatter about PMOG which might be a little better suited for me.

The real problem is value. These games seem like they can really suck out a lot of time, so what’s the value of them? And it doesn’t have to be an educational value, which I’m starting to see more of in Second Life. And while there may be professional value for public librarians who use gaming to expand library services and presences in virtual worlds, that’s not my current situation. It’s ok if they’re just fun, entertainment value is valuable. But I haven’t figured out which game might deliver that.

The time investment is a big issue also. There may be weeks at a time when I may not touch my computer outside of work. I need a game that I can drop for a few weeks and pick up later.

But again, maybe with the creation of a specific guild in WoW now’s the time to try it out, or at least start some research finding a game that’s right for me.

If you’re reading this and have a plug for a game that should be on my shortlist please let me know.

Or maybe I’ll just follow Joshua’s advice and settle for a nice game of chess.

Tags: gaming & libraries

This entry was posted on Friday, July 25th, 2008 at 1:48 pm and is filed under Web.
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My response:

1. Michael Porter Says: Your comment is awaiting moderation.
July 25th, 2008 at 5:07 pm

Hey Jason,
When you said “I’m not completely sure what the significance of that is” in relation to the Libraries and Librarians Guild, I’d have to say that in many ways we (the Guild) aren’t either. It is an experiment really, an we as a community will decide it’s significance as the group evolves.

It is only a couple of days old, but in the rare hours when a few of us were playing at the same time we did a whole bunch of text chatting where we introduced ourselves, found out about mutual Libraryland friends and interests, and well, just had fun hanging out as librarians with a similar experiences and interest. If nothing else, that, to me anyway, has some pretty solid value.

You make a good point though in that WoW can be a massive time suck. But so can tv, or anything else you do for fun and really enjoy. Ultimately though you have control over that and decide how to let it suck up your time. And even if you don’t play more than a few hours a week, it is still the best video game I have ever played (well, there is always Ms. Pacman, Tempest, Miner 49er, Sly Cooper II and Zelda Windwaker, but other than THOSE, LOL).

But Wow is definitely not for everybody. For instance there is the monthly playing fee which isn’t to everyones liking (though a $50 game disc is 4 times that fee and gives much less value generally in my experience). Truth be told I hate faeries and Orcs and wizards and all that stuff. But I like the simplicity coupled with complexity of this game a lot. Also the actual game play and the social facets. Those win me over.

Anyway, thanks for your post. WoW play or no WoW play, its all good. I’m ust glad we are noticing the tech developmetns that are changing so many things we as libraries and info pros do.

PS-Another part of why I play WoW that I didnt mention is that I believe browsing the web will be a lot like WoW in a decade or two. ore like WoW though, not like Second Life (at this point anyway).
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You all have any thoughts?

And you saw my blog post about the Guild too, right?:
http://www.libraryman.com/blog/2008/07/24/the-libraries-and-librarians-guild-in-wow-the-largest-on-line-mmorpg-game-in-the-world/

Jenny plugged us too on The Shifted Librarian blog:
http://theshiftedlibrarian.com/archives/2008/07/24/wow-your-librarian-friends.html