I've been reading with interest some of the discussion about SL on the list
and just wanted to add the following:

*  As in all things, you should research who you can reach via SL and if it
is appropriate for your museum; it is no different than a new publication or
a new programming series in this way. What you shouldn't do is use yourself,
your family, or the people you had lunch with as the beginning and end of
your research into SL and its potential for your museum.

*  I have no idea if SL will be a big deal five years from now or it is a
worthwhile investment in terms of time and money, but it seems worthwhile to
explore. I'm guessing in the early '90s museum workers had similar
conversations about the Internet:  people won't visit your museum, if they
can see it all online; only kids are getting online, it's not where the
donors are; if you put your collection online, you're giving it away for
free... Again, I'm not saying SL is the next face of the Internet, but
putting it in these terms makes me reconsider some of these objections more
thoughtfully.

*  I expect the most predictable thing is to just imagine a recreation of
your museum space on SL because the true creative potential is for SL to be
a bonus to your museum, not its duplicate (though, admittedly, a recreation
of your museum in SL allows for things unlikely to happen in realspace, eg,
a rock concert being held inside the Met). The example of the van Gogh
museum is a good one:
Erin O'Malley wrote, "Visitors can walk into various van Gogh paintings and
explore them.  I've heard from several non-museum going people that they've
been to the Second Life van Gogh museum and just loved it."
What spaces are significant to your museum that are not part of your
collection or can't possibly be part of your collection? I'm thinking of the
Baltimore Museum of Art's virtual reality version of the Cone sister's
apartments (see the link at the bottom of this page:
http://artbma.org/collection/overview/cone.html) or of a recreation of the
church of St Vincent to show the original display of Rouen Cathedral's
stained glass. What if you were able to virtually archive your museum's
exhibits? What if my avatar could walk through the 1913 Armory show? What
unique, fragile objects in your collection could I learn more about if I
could handle a 3D representation of them and actually see how they worked?

Roger says it's digital escapism as if that can only be a bad thing. I see
educational opportunities in slipping into a van Gogh painting or visiting
the Armory show--even virtually. Maybe we don't all have the time, energy,
or money to invest in SL right this second and maybe your institution's
research will show it's time isn't now, but I don't think tossing around the
ideas and possibilities should be such a doom-and-gloom exercise as many
posts have made out.

Thanks for listening,

Angelique Weger

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