ROI vs. "Meeting the user where they are"

January 23rd, 2008 Stewart Posted in library 2.0, library reference, second life |

Marketplace: Second Life’s economy slows down, too

It was some time ago, nearly two years I believe, that my friend Jim Milles introduced me to Second Life. Libraries were jumping on board in significant numbers as part of the Library 2.0 movement, an effort to meet the user where they are. But several things struck me as being a bad fit for libraries with Second Life:

• Second Life is a proprietary platform. While a 3-D VR web might open up some interesting venues for libraries to explore eventually, doing it all through one particular “game world” is limiting.
• People don’t go to Second Life’s virtual world to do research. (They go to Google.)
• Second Life costs real money if you want to play in any substantial way. Now that false economy is failing (see story above) and users are leaving Second Life in droves.

For pretty much every library, only a very small percentage of your primary users are on Second Life. For others to join, they’ll have to download proprietary software, build an avatar, and learn how to navigate in a 3D environment. And in the end, the librarian will still be pointing the patron to old-fashioned 2D resources. To be blunt, I never saw the point of all this.

Compare this with, say, Facebook. For a college or university library, it’s safe to say that a large number of your students, as well as some alumni and faculty, are already members. Setting up a business page on Facebook costs nothing, takes relatively little time to set up, and you can load search apps and forms for your most often used resources like the catalog and Google Scholar.

Meeting the user where they are is a very worthwhile goal, and libraries that pursue it should be innovative in their approaches. That said, as we continue to do more work with fewer resources, we should carefully consider our return on investment before taking the plunge with services like Second Life.