Leon County Public Library and Second Life

So this week I spent a LOT of time exploring Second Life. I had spoken to the Head of Youth Services at the LeRoy Collins Leon County Public Library, Mary Douglas, last week about implementing some new virtual reference tools at the library as my final project. I mentioned Second Life as a possible choice, and it turns out that the Head of the LCLCPL system, Helen, jumped all over it. She really wants to create a presence on Second Life, and she thought Mary and me were the people to do it. So I spent quite a few hours trying to get the basics of Second Life over the weekend, so I could be ready for when Mary called a meeting.

She emailed me to let me know that Tuesday would be a good day for the meeting, so after my shift at Goldstein I headed over to the LCLCPL, laptop in tow. I figured I would be showing her everything I knew, from creating an account to making your avatar look vaguely like you. Mary was already ahead of me - she had her account set up, her avatar exploring Help Island, so I wasted no time in joining her there. Lucky for us, a woman named Connie Powell showed up and started talking to us. She is a Harvard librarian and she spent a good 20 minutes talking to us about how to start our own Second Life Island for the LCLCPL. (Of course, Mary was on one of the library's computers and I was on my laptop, so we were sitting right next to each other in RL, and standing next to each other in SL, which was pretty funny!)

After Connie left, she sent me and Mary a link to her Harvard library page. We went to explore, and what a cool place! Someone had set up the pyramids of Giza, and you could go in and click on different tombs to play an audio file or read a lecture about it. This is the kind of interactive, dynamic environment Helen and Mary want to have for LCLCPL, so Mary was really excited to find and explore this location.

2 hours later, Mary says that she wants to set up the island for Teen Second Life. I spent the next 45 minutes trying to explain to her that TSL was a completely different thing from SL - she thought you could just set up the island in some kind of "teen zone" but that everyone from SL could visit. Mary wants the LCLCPL page to be inviting to college students, as well as teens, and when she realized that SL people can't visit TSL, she was really disappointed.

We also couldn't find the right pricing for setting up our island. There was talk of estates, and open spaces, and renting, and owning... At this point, the meeting had been going on for 3 hours and Mary and I were tired of SL. We realized that it would be too much for the LCLCPL to start an island in SL now, especially since they are short on staff. Maintaining a SL island would require a lot more manpower than the LCLCPL can spare. So Mary sent an email to Helen, explaining the situation, and reminding her that we could start smaller, like setting up a Facebook or MySpace page, and maybe work up to SL. There were just too many unknowns, and from our best guesses, it would cost the library around $3,000 for 1 year of owning an island - Facebook and MySpace are both free.

I haven't heard from Mary what Helen said to this, but it's clear that Mary (and Helen) are interested in branching out of the traditional library reference and making the LCLCPL more accessible. If Helen oks the social networking sites, I will start with a MySpace page, as I saw in last night's class that way more libraries have MySpace pages. Facebook will most likely be the page that entices the college students since more college students use Facebook more than MySpace, but since the primary audience is teens we will go to where the teens are.