Save the Time of the Avatar: Canadian Academic Libraries Using Chat Reference in Multi-User Virtual Environments

Abstract

Hundreds of librarians from around the world are exploring and volunteering their time in Second Life, evaluating the possibilities of offering a reference service in this environment. This article places virtual world reference service within the reference continuum and explores how a reference service could be offered by an academic institution in a virtual world, what additional skills are required for such a service, and whether there is a need for a virtual reference service.

KEYWORDS:

• reference
• virtual worlds
• presence
• online

Notes

1. Total Second Life residents as of January 26, 2009; 16,785,531 according to http://secondlife.com/whatis/economy_stats.php (accessed January 27, 2009).

2. As stated in the Terms of Service for Second Life found at http://secondlife.com/whatis/ip_rights.php (accessed April 5, 2009).

3. Nowak (2004) found the opposite—that less anthropomorphic avatars were preferred by her test subjects—but agrees that this contradicts most other studies on the topic. She believes this may have been due to the fact that she was also testing embodied agents and that the interaction did not meet the expectation of the “human” representation when people were confronted with a realistic human likeness but supported by an embodied agent.