Lebachai Vesta (real life: Laura Solomon), theAugust Volunteer of the Month, likened her initiation into Second Life  to “the proverbial falling down the rabbit hole.”  As she put it, “I had heard about the Second Life Library project. And I'm a web developer by trade (and librarian), so I figured I needed to see what the hype was all about.”

At first, she found the reference desk, which had a buzzer on it.  She contacted Abbey Zenith, and found herself setting up a virtual computer in a virtual world – on her real life lunch hour.   She found it a bit strange to be doing virtual IT work, but she stuck to it, and became a fixture.

After that first task, which was designed to help people find information on web sites while in SL, she became a greeter on Info Island, and occasionally assisted at the reference desk as well.

Her private life in SL has been unusual: in 2007 she and her real life husband bought a sim with the intention of recreating many real life Key West structures on it.  Her in-laws live in Key West; she had wanted to rent a Key West-style house in SL, and when she couldn’t locate such a thing, she thought there might be a niche market for this type of architecture.  She says it was beautiful as well as fun, but ultimately the economics of maintaining a sim made it impossible for them to continue the effort.  However, as she puts it, the sim was absolutely invaluable for her in learning how to manage land, tenants, permissions, and similar SL hurdles.

After that, she took over the running of Callahan’s Place in SL.  Those familiar with Spider Robinson’s series of books, as is this author, will be delighted to know that Callahan’s Place exists, and that one can join the group of Callahooligans, formally known as Callahan’s Crosstime Saloon.

A major contribution of Lebachai has been the coordination of infoisland.org, which she took over about three years ago.  She ran it as a Drupal site, although it has now been converted to Wordpress.

In real life, Lebachai is both a children’s librarian and a techie – an interesting combination.  She is responsible for web development for the Ohio Public Library Information Network (OPLIN).  With the ability to telecommute much of the time, she has just sent her 6-year-old son off to kindergarten.

You will be surprised and delighted to learn that in her spare time she does Irish step dancing competitively.  Maybe we can persuade her to give us a demonstration in SL!