Virtual Reality and Libraries by Laura Bisagna

Remember that song that Madonna used to sing back in the 80s?  Where she said she was a material girl living in a material world? Well, these days she might be singing an entirely different tune, something more along the lines of being a material girl living in a virtual world!  Virtual reality is here to stay. What does that mean for the library tech and specifically for presentation tools?  

As mentioned in one of my other LT130 blog posts, students first turn to Google to find the answers to all of their research questions; a fact of which, I’m sure, you are all well aware.   So can libraries compete with this new reality, this virtual reality, and change this course of action when it comes to the educational needs of the student, more specifically for their school-related research?  In the article, Your Library Goes Virtual: Promoting Reading and Supporting Research, the author Audrey Church believes that we can, and must.   She states that “Your school library Web page is your library’s presence outside of the physical library walls.  It provides you a space and an opportunity to inform, guide, and instruct.  It can be an advocacy tool, a visibility tool, and a public relations tool.  Through it, you can provide for your students the scaffolding needed to promote reading and support research." How do we, as library techs, do this? 

While Church recommends that the library webpage be an important search tool, a portal to “support research and promote reading,” I believe one way to effectively do this is by incorporating virtual presentation tools that guide the user through the steps it takes to research their online catalogs and databases.  One powerful way to do this is through an effective PowerPoint or Google Slides presentation, meeting the virtual user with a virtual tutorial, showing step-by-step how easy and effective it can be to research things in the library’s database to find unique and interesting information that cannot be found floating around on the web, but can only be found in these special databases.  It’s like finding virtual gold!

I recently completed a Google Slides presentation tutorial on just this topic: How to research the Palomar College Database, specifically, for the Berg Fashion Library.  I post it here in this blog as an example of one possible way for library techs to inspire, educate, and inform virtual-reality-style researchers and library users, to let them know what incredible content is available in countless library databases and how easy it is to do in-depth searches on the webpages of many libraries.

Here's the link:

https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/1BiIas22ylc0-NAVPaX-93J-BX6n0Auelmii1r2Y1ptw/edit?usp=sharing

Work cited:

Your Library Goes Virtual: Promoting Reading and Supporting Research, Church, Audrey. Library Media Connection, v25 n3 p10-13 Nov-Dec 2006.