Second Life

Hi all

I'm several weeks behind on this project due to pressure of work.

However, I've just had a look at the Second Life information on the ABC site. I did see this program when it was broadcast, and wondered at the time how it could be incorporated into library services.

It reminded me a bit of a previous employer's intranet, where they had created a moving image of a librarian who could answer questions. She was sitting within a virtual library, and one clicked on reference books to see a list of the available references, computer screen to search the catalogue, etc.

However, Second Life is very much more sophisticated than this. I was interested in the link to a list of educational institutions using Second Life http://simteach.com/wiki/index.php?title=Institutions_and_Organizations_in_SL, but couldn't get this to work. I'll try again later.

In the article "Second-Guessing Second Life: Is this Virtual Playground Worth Your Marketing Dollars?" http://www.adotas.com/2007/03/second-guessing-second-life-is-this-virtual-playground-worth-your-marketing-dollars/ it states that "Second Life jives heavily with the Web 2.0 mentality. It’s community-based and gives users control of just about everything. " This may be what makes a virtual library a success - that many of our users will like to interact in this manner. It seems an extension of 'meeting the users where they are'. Of course, some will not, and will still prefer to phone, email or visit us. The article "The Online Disinhibition Effect"
http://www.rider.edu/~suler/psycyber/disinhibit.html also states that in cyberspace we are all equals. This could encourage some students to approach a library avatar for help where they may not approach a Reference Librarian in the library. However, I think we are fairly approachable.

Second Life MAY be one way to offer a reference service without staffing a Reference Desk, but we would need to also have a method of helping users who physically visit the library, not just tell them to log onto SL!


Lastly, the San Jose University video on YouTube was interesting - we could see the Reference Librarian typing the answer to a query!