Second Life is a gathering place first and anything else second.  Retailers who jumped on early soon learned that people were just not interested in shopping there and have largely pulled out.  There are quite a few universities on there, but like rquick mentioned about SLIS, they are ghost towns with the exception of the occassional discussion group meeting.  In fact, most of SL is a ghost town.  I flew around and landed on palatial estates and strolled around as a trespasser before I realized that I was on someone's pad and really shouldn't be there.  The "owner" wasn't there.  Can't be there 24/7 . . .and really, why would you want a big empty palace?  That's a RL question I've pondered . . .

I can visuaize uses for classroom/discussion/business meetings and definitely  see the "fun" potential of dressing up the avatar and playing the SL game and going to funky places.  However, I don't see it as an information place.  Clay Shirky hit the nail on the head in his talk when he stated that gathering places don't really work for information dissemination and info places don't necessarily work well for gathering. I'm going straight to the Internet if I'm working on something.  I can search a lot faster than I can logon and the travel to and communicate in SL -- soooo slow!

For me it's easy to see the value and applicability of most of the applications we've reviewed, but SL is a real stretch.  It would be very time consuming to "staff" and I don't see public library patrons going there.  Also, I'm not sure what the RL demographics are for SL, but my guess is a large part of our population served would not be interested, or if interested, could not access.  Roughly half our patrons are immigrants and do not have access to the internet at home and our system won't allow downloading of software, so they can't access at the library . . .  There is also the language issue to consider.  It is difficult in real life, but at least we have non-verbal language that helps.  Text is just text and the gestures are so canned that they can't properly convey what's needed.

Sorry.  Not really a fan.

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