The full article touches upon some of the same topics as the previous article and these guys did extensive research into museums in Second Life. Here's a brief about their paper.

http://www.archimuse.com/mw2007/papers/urban/urban.html

Abstract

The paper gives an overview of some of the museum-like activities currently being undertaken in Second Life. Current development is mainly in the hands of pioneers, often interested amateurs engaging in serious leisure to create spaces enabling them to share their interests with others. These efforts are explored in this paper through a systematic analysis of museum visits and a qualitative analysis of interviews with designers and developers of museums in Second Life. Findings identified include the impact of the current technology on what is created, and the importance of interaction-centric designs.

1. Introduction

Museums have been exploring the use of multi-user virtual environments (MUVEs) for more than a decade, often in the form of proprietary, non-persistent virtual worlds designed and developed for select audiences such as teachers and students. Since launching in 2003, the on-line virtual community of Second Life (http://www.secondlife.com/) has attracted over 900,000 dedicated ‘residents’ who are laying the foundations for widespread adoption of MUVEs by museums, libraries, archives, and other information organizations.

Already there is a range of museum-like activities occurring in Second Life (SL). There are many parallels with the early development of the Web, including how resident-developed museum spaces currently outnumber those created by real-life museums (see Taylor, 1995). These experiments in a new medium can tell us a lot about what ‘real-life’ museums should consider, as well as how we might want to inform and re-merge with our physical resources. SL museums can be about historical re-enactment, such as dressing up and walking around Ancient Rome with other residents acting in character – a variant on real life (RL) re-enactments. There are SL museums containing digitized RL artifacts. There are other collections of 'born digital' artifacts created in SL that are collected, curated and preserved by in-world museums. There are outdoor sculpture parks, places that are more like art galleries, and venues to support Warhol-like art happenings. There are labels, lectures, tours, audio guides, docents, even museum shops. Some of the museums created in Second Life are now seeking affiliations with real-life artists, or museums, and others are actively establishing themselves as 501(c)3 non-profit organizations.

This paper presents a selection of the results from our work that attempts to understand the nature, diversity and evolution of current museum and museum-like activities in Second Life. Drawing on the experience and lessons learned from past museum virtual environments, non-museum collaborative spaces, and recent research on learning in multiplayer on-line games, this research can serve as a guide for museums interested in establishing a virtual presence in Second Life.

Second Life currently has many parallels with the early days of the Web. It is an exciting place that participants are co-creating while simultaneously trying to understand what it is, what it might be, and what it is good for. It has many potential contexts of use, but as in the early days of the Web, cultural heritage applications are part of that pioneering exploration. The preliminary results of this research do more than indicate the opportunities and challenges of using Second Lifeas a platform for museums; they suggest that it is equally important to understand how museums may become collaborative partners in an already evolving community. Even more so than the Web, SL is not just about providing information and artifacts. It is about facilitating interaction. Because SL residents have already decided that museum-like activities need to be an important part of their second lives, a study of how they construct these activities may provide museums with important clues about how they might engage virtual audiences in ways that they have not been able to in the past.