Museums &
Archeological
Modeling
Richard Urban University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign rjurban@uiuc.edu
Michael B. Twidale University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign twidale@uiuc.edu
Paul F. Marty Florida State University marty@fsu.edu
Origins
• 1970s MUDs
Multi-User Dimension
• 1980s MOOs
MUD Object Oriented
• 1990s MUVEs
Multi-User Virtual
Environments
• 2003 Linden Labs launches
Second Life
Observations
Serious Leisure
• Second Life residents have chosen to make museums, art,
history and culture a growing part of the Second Life
experience.
• Museum and cultural sites identified in Second Life have
been created by residents for residents
• “Real-Life” museums and archeologists are just beginning to
create their own spaces
Analysis
• Third Places: Oldenberg identified coffee shops, bars, and
bowling alleys as “third places” (neither work nor home)
where civic engagement happens.
Third Places
• Serious Leisure is characterized by Stebbins as:
– need to persevere at the activity
– availability of a leisure career
– need to put in effort to gain skill and knowledge
– realization of various special benefits
– unique ethos and social world
– an attractive personal and social identity.
• Second Life serves as a Third Place where residents
can pursue Serious Leisure activities.
• Museums and humanities projects can engage Second Life
residents in the same way they engage volunteers, docents,
amateur scholars and fieldworkers.
• Second Life provides an opportunity for co-creation of virtual
spaces.

Museums & Okapi Island
Archeological
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Okapi/128/128/0
Modeling Okapi is one of the only academic archeological modeling projects we found in Second Life. It is
currently being developed by the Open Knowledge and the Public Interest Project at the University of
California - Berkeley. A blog documents the progress of this project at http://okapi.wordpress.com
Richard Urban
Mayan artifacts at Xibalba (see below)
Graduate School of Library and Information Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
rjurban@uiuc.edu
http://isrl.uiuc.edu/~rjurban
Themiskyra Throne Room
Michael B. Twidale
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Themiskyra/81/241/21
Graduate School of Library & Information Science
Themiskyra is part of a larger Egyptian themed
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
store and role play complex.
twidale@uiuc.edu
http://people.lis.uiuc.edu/~twidale/
Second Louvre
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Tompson/153/96/100/
Paul F. Marty
College of Information
Florida State University
marty@fsu.edu
http://mailer.fsu.edu/~pmarty Although modeled on the architecture of the “real-life” Louvre, the SL Louvre contains artwork and sculpture created
by residents of SL using SL modeling tools.
Related Research Xibalba - Mayan Temple
International Spaceflight
Museum
Urban, R. et al., A Second Life for Your http://slurl.com/secondlife/Info%20Island%20II/35/217/2
Third Places
Museum: 3D Multi-User Virtual Environments Xibalba features information about Mayan
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Spacep
and Museums. In J. Trant and D. Bearman civilization and examples of Mayan objects
ort%20Alpha/48/75/22/
(shown above)
(eds). Museums and the Web 2007:
Proceedings. Toronto: Archives & Museum
Informatics, published March 31, 2007 at
http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/papers/urban/urban.html
Caves of Lascaux
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Mod
esta/119/36/60/