Happy Birthday to Me! Reflections on My Second Life

Well, not exactly me, but one year ago today, an avatar named Anne Idler was first rezzed into Second Life, bewildered, aimless and not quite sure what she was getting into.

It's been an interesting year of experimenting, learning, building, networking, rebuilding, teaching, and more. One thing that has evolved along with my virtual skills (and avatar, see left!) is my attitude and confidence about being "that librarian who knows about Second Life," as Kathryn Greenhill put it several months ago over at Librarians Matter. Kathryn was wondering if that was how she wanted to be known in the community, and at the time (back in May), I was wondering the same thing. Alongside the worry about having too much fun, spending time away from "serious" endeavors, and how those factors could impact my professional reputation was the knowledge that this was my first year in the profession, and I was building that reputation from scratch. What if Second Life turned out to be some crazy, flash in the pan folly? What if most of the law library community thought it was silly, frivolous, and irrelevant? Would I would be forever known as "that (silly/frivolous/irrelevant/etc.) Second Life librarian"?

I needn't have worried. About six weeks after I mentioned Kathryn's post and my plans to comment further about it (only now fulfilled), I went to my second AALL annual meeting. To my surprise, I discovered that "that Second Life law librarian" had generalized into "that librarian who's great with technology." Everyone I talked with about Second Life, acquaintances both new and from the previous year, thought it was an interesting and exciting thing to be exploring. I'm sure there are some law librarians who think it is silly, frivolous, and irrelevant all at once--and many more who haven't heard about it--but there were more than enough in the former category that I'm not worried about it anymore.

While it was a reassuring conference on a personal level, it was also eye-opening at the professional level. In the law librarianship course I took in library school, I was made aware that law librarians are often slower to change and try new things than the profession at large. Subsequently having been so encouraged to explore new things in my job, I thought perhaps that was outdated or incorrect information. However, many of my peers in age and/or experience in addition to thinking Second Life was cool, expressed their envy at my getting to explore ANY new things at all, technology-related or otherwise. There may have been some away from home/conference venting going on, but I heard such thoughts from enough people that it made an impression.

Networking with Second Life librarians from all types of libraries has helped to clarify my thoughts on why it is important to play with this new technology, much as it was to tinker with HTML and websites was in the mid-90s. I'm almost done putting together built 2.0 of the NSU Law Library in Second Life, and I'm planning to show it to some of our faculty once it's ready. I'm excited about that, because I think Second Life ultimately has more interesting potential for subject-area learning--role-playing, cultural studies, integration with learning management systems for distance learning, and especially the legal issues relating to virtual worlds, among other reasons--than librarianship. But I also have a new legal research exhibit idea based on some of the ideas I've had and borrowed from others during my first two years of visiting Legal Skills and Values classes to teach online research concepts to our first-year students.

Now if only I had a Second 24 Hours each day...