Libraries in Second Life do not serve the same purpose that libraries do in real life. Physical libraries nowadays serve little purpose except as an outlet for those looking to seek a quiet environment to either study or relax.
Penn State's Pattee and Paterno Libraries are an excellent place for students to crank out their 10-page papers or study for a killer exam. It's also like any other library, with a wide selection of resourceful books and a coffee place.
Penn State Investment in Second Life Library
Purchasing an island in Second Life is an expensive proposition. Therefore, it would be imperative that those with the capitol to purchase said islands to populate them with something useful. Many ideas spring to mind to do something useful with the virtual space of Second Life but it seems that those with resources to implement them are too busy with other noble endeavors, like populating the world with more and more complex hookers and other nefarious types of porn.
Second Life has many potential uses. Libraries are not and should not be one of them. Every library in second bears almost no resemblance to that of a real life library. Libraries in Second Life are the bastard offspring of real libraries and MySpace due to the fact that is absolutely no substance to the virtual libraries. Much like MySpace, a social networking site that offers absolutely nothing useful to society, libraries in Second Life do nothing to further the evolution of real libraries. There are not more efficient, not easier to use, and definitely do not offer the same level of selection of even the smallest county libraries. They don’t do anything at all useful. The following pages and paragraphs will go into detail about why Second Life libraries are useless.
All of the libraries that we found during our adventures in Second Life did not resemble their real life counterparts to any great extent. Libraries in Second Life contain a lot of vanity; for example, the Cleveland Public Library consisted of chessboards. Yes, chessboards are the best thing the Cleveland Public library could come up with for their virtual library.
Here is an article about Cleveland Public Library's Second Life project:
http://www.cpl.org/?q=node/2311
After reading the article it becomes apparent that calling the virtual library a library is really a misnomer. Cleveland Public Library's goal in creating their virtual presence seems to be showing off their chessboard collection. In their defense, they do have largest collection of Chess items in the world but we do not feel that they should market their library as library. There are no books to be found anywhere on their space. One would think that libraries in Second Life would work much like digital books, only instead of browsing for new books in a traditional sense a user has the opportunity to traverse a space that resembles that of the real thing and actually look at and borrow books. This would be very useful, because there might arise a situation due to weather, emergencies, etc that would prevent someone from going to an actual library.
This is not the case, however. Second Life libraries do not have books, and if they did they would likely charge linden dollars for their rental. This is turn goes against the concept of a library and defeats its purpose, which is to provide free information to students in the form of textbooks, articles and magazines.
The problem of not having books in Second Life libraries is not limited to those libraries ran by cities and private individuals, university libraries are lacking as well. After exploring Stanford’s library in Second Life we were left extremely under whelmed.
Here is some information of Stanford's Second Life Library:
http://speaking.stanford.edu/library/SULAIR_in_Second_Life.html
We felt that the best chance of finding a good use of a virtual library would be in the academic sector of Second Life, but we were proven wrong. Stanford’s library provides links to its real life library operations and other Stanford related things.
What is the point of this? Most college students, especially those enrolled at a prestigious university such as Stanford probably know where to find their library. How likely are average students to be influenced to go to the library, which they already know of, by a virtual space that they are likely to never visit throughout their entire academic career? This is the number one knock our group has with Second Life activities. A lot of them can be done much better and have been done before on a traditional two dimensional web space. Who wants to spend the hours needed to become proficient with Second Life and its terrible interface to find information that can find on their university's website? Why do something in an hour that could take 5 minutes with a simple search of the Internet via Google?
There are a couple interesting things about Stanford's place that could prove interesting and useful, however. Inside the library there are virtual study lounges. These could be useful for group projects when members of the group are out of town for various reasons. Second Life does provide a more personal interaction than that of instant messenger. We feel that this sense of realness that Second Life provides cannot be matched by traditional means of communication. Stanford's study rooms in library would be useful to have but we do not feel that would be used by most students. Technology is only useful if the users of the technology know how to use. We do not feel that a randomly assigned group at Penn State that has an Economics General Education project to do could pull off the virtual meeting. Even if the group had the technical knowhow to meet up in Second Life it is likely that Second Life would crash, slowing down any progress the group has made.
Instead of forcing users to find their answers to their questions scattered about the Internet on YouTube and Google the maker of Second Life made an island known as Information Island. The Second Life Information Island Library actually provides a useful service, and probably does the best job that a library in Second Life can possibly do. This library provides links to useful information about Second Life. We found out a lot from Information Island about how to manipulate the world of Second Life. We feel that it is much easier to learn how to accomplish various tasks in Second Life via a source of reference inside the world itself.
Information Island works by being separated into different section that deals with different aspects of Second Life. From building to movement it has it all. Most of the click able things inside of the library provide note cards that give users the information they seek about the world. If the answer needed cannot be answered by just a single note card then the user is directed to a website that goes into more detail. This concept works, in our opinion. People want this information while they are in Second Life and it is readily available to them. This is the problem with most of the other library applications in Second Life. They do not do anything better than their real life counterparts. Information Island provides more information faster than one can find it on the traditional Internet.
Second Life shows a lot of promise for the future, but in its present state it is just not useful for very much of anything besides forwarding people to a more official entity on the world wide web. This is not really the fault of the idea of Second Life but rather the current technology of today and poor design. World of Warcraft handles almost 10 million active subscribers while Second Life handles 200 thousand relatively poorly. If a company with the money, time, and technical knowhow decided to make their own version of a virtual land it could prove to be useful and become a new way of organizing information. We are looking at you Google Metaverse. There a lot of things in Second Life that are just inefficient. There is no tangible advantage to doing some things on Second Life that can’t be done in a more traditional. Is it really more of an immersing experience to have a low resolution and polygon count avatar in a meeting than it is to have a video conference? The same principle holds true with libraries. What is the point of having a library in Second Life that just points the user of it toward the real life counterpart? There isn't one. The main thing that Second Life libraries do today is point users at information on the web. This is not a good use of Penn State’s resources. The money would be much better spent getting more books for the stacks of Paterno and Patee. In the future, when the average computational power of the average person increases to an acceptable level companies may be able construct new more efficient versions of what we have. For example, a company like Amazon could have a virtual library that allows users to preview different books by clicking them in their virtual aisles. If the user is intrigued they could then check out a virtual copy of that book for free and read it at their home in Second Life or in the lounge of Amazon's library. If they like the book, they could then by a real life copy of the book through the library and have it shipped to their real life house. This sounds great in concept, but again there is a lack of interest for the tremendous investment required to make this happen be returned.
We feel that Penn State should not invest in a library in Second Life, for many of the reasons already stated above. To conclude our points, Second Life islands are disproportional in cost to the amount of use the University would get out of them. It would realistically cost thousands of dollars a year to own a library in Second Life. This does not include the time and money that would be spent on creating a quality library system in the virtual space. Throwing that much at a project that will at best direct students to an official website about the Paterno and Patee library and show a little bit of Penn State Pride seems like a bad investment at the time. This is not to say that it may not ever be a good time to invest in a virtual library, the time is just not now. There are not enough people in Second Life and there are definitely not enough students at the university that would even attempt to use a Second Life library. The final issue with investing in a library is that there is no chance of making any money back on the investment in a traditional library sense. Libraries are public services that provide free access to information. How could the university make money back on an investment for something that is inherently free and nobody wants to use?
The island of Istania already provides the same amount of use that these so called libraries in Second Life. It provides links about the University, just like Stanford's does and Cleveland's provides links to its physical location. It is the opinion of Team Skynet that Penn State should not invest in a virtual library at this time as they do not provide any tangible use that cannot be accomplished with a traditional library or with current forms of communication.
Here's the link to our Powerpoint:
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