Karuna: Celebrate Life!
Karuna's History

Karuna is funded by a grant from the National Library of Medicine written by Lori Bell of the Alliance Library System in East Peoria, Illinois.  When the grant came through, the project team had a little less than two months to organize, plan, design, build, and decorate for Karuna's grand opening on World AIDS Day, December 1, 2008. 

The result was a whirlwind of activity that left most of us breathless, but the results were well worth it.  Below you can learn about the project team and the roles each of them played in Karuna's creation.   For more information on the grand opening, please visit the World AIDS Day page.

Lori Bell Project Administrator, PI

Director of Innovations at the Alliance Library System in East Peoria Illinois, Lori Bell is the driving force behind the strong multi-type library presence in Second Life, now consisting of more than 1,000 librarians. Alliance has demonstrated its commitment to supporting pioneer endeavors to support people in a virtual environment, exploring the future of the library profession by fostering a highly networked, collaborative environment. Her efforts have also attracted a large number of universities to the virtual world.


Lori has written and coordinated a number of grant projects from different sources; this is one of her main duties in her current position. Two of these projects are former Greater Midwest Region/National Library of Medicine projects including "Project Healthy" and "HealthInfo Central Illinois." Project Healthy was the recipient of the NCLIS 2006 Health Award for Illinois.

Lori has worked in a variety of library settings including a large hospital library. She has written numerous articles on library technology, is a columnist for "Computers in Libraries," and was named a 2004 Library Journal "Mover and Shaker." Bell has also served as an adjunct instructor in Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois and Dominican University and she will be spending approximately ten hours per month on the project

Lori's role in Second Life has involved creating and conducting training sessions on searching, identifying quality health information, and helping to foster a large network of health support groups as a way to extend awareness and involvement.

Carol Perryman, MSLIS, TRLN Doctoral Fellow, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill Project Coordinator October 2008-May 2009

Carol (Carolina Keats in SL) is a medical and consumer health librarian who worked in public and medical libraries for 20 years before getting my MSLIS - and now my PhD. While my current research is in evidence-based library and information practice (with a particular focus on librarian information behaviors), I have for some years retained interest in consumer health information. Prior to my involvement in Second Life, I conducted several research studies with people who are active in a web forum about smoking cessation, QuitNet.com. I have a very strong belief in what peer communities can achieve in terms of supporting health behavior change, and even in sharing a process of critical evaluation of health information - I’ve seen it happen again and again.

This experience is very much what has drawn me to become involved in Second Life. In 2006, Lori Bell wrote the contract application that funded Healthinfo Island, with the objective of exploring the provision of consumer health information services in a virtual environment. It is this basic objective that has formed the basis for the ensuing three projects, all funded by the National Library of Medicine (the first three, through the Greater Midwest Region of NN/LM, and this most recent, directly from NLM), and all administed by Lori Bell through the Alliance Library System in East Peoria

Jena Ball (Jenaia Morane): Island Designer and Overseer of The Garden of Experience

Jena Ball is a writer, editor, and educator with an avid interest in how virtual reality is shaping how we see and interact with one another. The founder of The Nature of Writing (www.thenatureofwriting) - a firm specializing in creating custom content for educational purposes (textbooks, online classes, Web sites) - she has penned everything from marketing collateral and syndicated columns to features for national publications. With more than 25 years teaching experience, she has worked with ESL students in Japan, junior and senior high school, junior college, and adult ed students.

For the Karuna project, she designed the layout of the island, oversaw the built, and set up the elements in the "Garden of Experience," where the stories of those dealing with HIV/AIDS are being collected, shared, and preserved in a variety of formats including narratives, poems, photographs, videos, music, and 3D builds.
Carol Perryman, Project Coordinator December 2008-May 2009
Karuna's floating stage as seen through the trees on a hilltop.  The floating stage and auditorium are the site on an ongoing series of concerts, panel discussions, and workshops Second Life's amazingly creative and diverse populuation.