The latest addition to social virtual worlds is SecondLife. In their least modest moments it has been described by creators and users as the sequel to the World Wide Web: Web 3.0 as it were. It is only natural then for a librarian to ask whether SecondLife (SL) has the potential to become ThirdLibrary.

I have used SL for some time now and tried to pinpoint the features that could make it useful for the library. There are a few. It is, compared to the previous generations of social virtual environments, a rich environment. It is possible to create your own objects and surroundings, from chairs via buildings to complete cities or islands. In these environments one can, well.... chat.

But there is a bit more. One can create objects of all kinds, including art, music streams or interactive objects using the scripting language LSL. These objects can be sold "in world" or used as advertisements for outside goods. There is a solid foundation for an online economy and online copyrights, because a creator can determine whether an object can be copied or modified by others; also the creator can set a price before an object is transferred from one owner to the other. The copyright enforcement is still strict and rigid and does not allow for the flexibility of, say, Creative Commons License, which would be beneficial for the (re-)use of scholarly works in SL.

Assuming for a moment that this world became so popular that most academics and students would join SL, these features are, to say the least, promising. Building an online library and populating it with books, reference librarians, search engines, links to sources in and outside of SL (that is the web) and what do you have? A library that can be accessed by anyone, everywhere, and all the time. A dream?

I am sorry to say that such dreams cannot be dreamed yet. First of all, SL is not as popular as some would have it. At any time there are, currently, around 30,000 users (reaching 40.000 at peak hours these days) online. It goes without saying that that is not enough for a thriving academic community, not even if all users would be academics (which God forbid, but that is another issue).

But the misery doesn't stop there.

SL is, to put it mildly, extremely bad in handling text. In SL itself the only useful way to present text on some self-made surface is by using pictures. That is like faxing a book, but without the convenience of a faxing machine!! Sure, there are note cards to present text to others, but the layout in those is basically the layout of an ASCII text, and note cards do not integrate in the environment. It is also not possible to create a text in SL by any other means than typing it. So much for self designed interactive forms, and the like! A solution would be to allow certain objects to act like web clients, but there is no sign that this will happen soon.

The interfacing with the web is also rather bad. There is one command in the scripting language that allows you to read web documents into SL, but besides being rather slow it has a mere 2K limit on the amount of data that can be transferred. There is also a function to start up websites in your browser and there are a few, rather clumsy commands, that allow you to work with XML_RPC, but only, yes only, in SL! And even there it has its quirks. Taken together these functions are simply too limited.

And transferring pictures from the web to SL? Forget it, can't be done without great, great efforts. You can upload pictures from your disk, but for that you have to pay for each pic (ok, only a very small amount, but still!).

The scripting language itself needs a redesign too. Although not without power, it is a very clumsy language. It has no support for multidimensional arrays and data storage is limited to only a few KB per script. It is extremely awkward too, to maintain a library of functions. There are ways to circumvent these limitations, but you better not have day job when you do that.

In short: SL shows great promise, but its promise has NOT been realized yet. Even worse, there is so much focus on performance, and perhaps on letting the user pay for the storage and CPU time, that essential functionality will probably not be implemented in the near future. And essential means here a good interfacing with the web and a decent handling of larger texts. Sometimes nice results are obtained, there are for example RSS readers in SL, but a library needs more and far better text handling capabilities.

Libraries and SL are not a happy marriage yet and I think that the ball lies in the court of the developers and creators of SL now. They have done a great job, but have as yet to undertake the necessary steps to make SL really useful for librarians and academics. "Chat only" is not enough.

(Mind you, it is rather nice to sit by a crackling virtual campfire with people from all over the world, talking philosophy or "what great books have you read lately"...) :)