Second Life
This morning I was in a meeting for SL library volunteers, and this guy teleported to the meeting, and he only spoke German, and I was reminded again of how global SL is. And this just made me think about how incredibly geographically driven our RL libraries are. Even in an academic library that offers online courses, I still feel completely like my library serves a specific community that's very much defined by our physical location. Another example-- urban public libraries are different than rural public libraries. In libraries we live by the "know the needs of your community" mantra.
So, where does this leave libraries in a virtual world completely undefined by geographic boundaries? How can my city's library system use my tax money to build a presence in SL that will support users who aren't paying taxes to our library system? Maybe if they use grant money? No. wait. Is this what people thought about building a website ten years ago (or getting a presence on MySpace before Beth Evans was named a LJ mover & shaker)? I think there's definitely an argument that a global presence serves a limited geographic region... and haven't we already argued that with the Internet?
For special libraries that unite users by interest, I think the value of SL is clear. Comic book archives, LGBT archives-- I think you should be on SL now (or maybe last month). Your users aren't as defined by geographic location.
We've also got collaboration-- one of the vital library 2.0 organs. There's so much to think about:
-- Using virtual meeting spaces to deliver staff trainings or have meetings.
-- Global collaboration between librarians & information scientists (on an individual basis). Wow.
-- The whole fun thing! You know how it was easier to teach people to use the mouse when you started with Solitaire? They can learn to program by building their own stuff in SL. It really encourages content creation even more (I think) than the "traditional" library 2.0 blogs & wikis, etc. I think it's a good way to get reluctant staff to really interact with technology.
-- Organizational partnerships. I'm not sure about individual users, but organizations are certainly taking notice and getting set-up on SL.
-- Branding. I'm not on SL that much (yet!) but when I'm there, I notice who else is there. SJSU-- you're on top of innovation! Hello, ALA! UIUC is there, and I stand a little taller and love my alumni status even more. Even if you're not branding for your users, I think it's good to be on SL to recruit new librarians (bc they're there and you'll look a little cooler if you are, too). And your users who are there-- they'll take notice.
So-- I leave you with this prediction: Second Life will turn into something important some day, though I'm not sure what. When I log in, it feels like I'm back in 1986, at my Apple IIe, with a super-slow dial-up modem connected to CompuServe (remember when there were command-line proprietary network type things that didn't attract that many people, before Netscape got invented)? And CompuServe didn't that battle, but distributed networking won the future.