The value of social computing environments has been demonstrated in many contexts, including web search, shared bookmarking and photo sharing, personal social networking, online support groups, and information resources such as Wikipedia. Collaborative game environments have been used as both research environments to study collaboration and as environments for facilitating scientific meetings, and professional organizations and scientific communities also leverage cyberinfrastructure and social network applications to share resources, collect data, and facilitate communication. Virtual worlds have also been applied to support a diverse range of professional and work activities, however, there is so far little empirical evidence on how virtual worlds are adopted and leveraged to promote scientific progress. The exploratory research proposed here aims to explore how virtual worlds can be leveraged in the digital curation community for purposes of improving work practices and training.
