Librarians and Second Life

Educational technologists seem to have a strong leaning towards Second Life, the bizarre online phenomenon which now means so much to so many people - 6,619,620, the site says, as of today. Is the same thing true of librarians (who sometimes bear an uncanny resemblance to the ed tech people)?

I have to admit that my first impulse (and second, too) is to see this as extremely retrograde. Functioning smoothly in the world they are actually standing in seems to be something which many librarians (among others) have yet to achieve, and a second life might seem a lower priority than this one.

However, Kathryn Greenhill has a great post headed Ten Very Good Reasons Why Your Librarians Should Be In Second Life. Read the ten reasons, and then read Kathryn's next post which offers six bad reasons, and also links to Walt Crawford on the topic - one of four million ghost avatars in Second Life, as he puts it. There is more than meets the eye.

What do you think? If people keep raising the subject, I'm going to have to have a look at Second Life myself.