 Welcome, everybody. I'm Cliff Lynch, the director of the Coalition for Networked Information. And I want to welcome you to this project briefing session that is a part of our Spring 2020 virtual meeting, which will be running until the end of May. Today, we are going to have a presentation on virtual reality in libraries and research partnership opportunities in that area. VR and library's roles in VR have been a ongoing area of interest to CNI and its members. And we've seen a number of looks at this over the past couple of years, most notably from Oklahoma. Today, we are joined by Doralyn Rossman, who is with the Montana State University. She will be giving us a presentation after which Diane Goldenberg-Hart from CNI will moderate Q&A and discussion. There is a question and answer tool on the bottom of your screen. And I would invite you to enter questions throughout the presentation as they occur to you. And we'll try and address them all at the end. But there's no reason to wait to put them in. I also refer you to the chat where we'll probably share out a few URLs and other things of interest during the presentation. And please feel free to use that as well. And with that very brief introduction, all that's left for me to do is to thank you all for joining us today and to express my great thanks to Doralyn for getting us better informed on this issue and over to you. OK, thanks very much, Cliff. I wanted to thank CNI also for having me on this session. I appreciate the opportunity to talk. And I say that partly because I really was looking forward to talking to you all in person at the CNI meeting. So I'm hoping you'll still chime in today and talking about VR and some possibilities. As Cliff mentioned, I'm at Montana State University. I'm an associate professor there and head of Digital Library Initiatives. And I wanted to start off by looking at this first slide. There's a lot of text on this slide, but it's really resonated with me. This is a blog post that was posted down the Ithaca SNR site the day before yesterday. And they were following up on a recent survey. And two of the findings they had, and I'm going to just read through these quickly, is that there's a consistent relationship between the library's investment and initiatives that align with broader institutional missions beyond the library and how directors believe that both they and their libraries are valued. They also say at doctoral universities, directors perceive that both they and their library are more highly valued when they also perceive that their supervisors highly value their research functions. This includes the library serving as a repository of resources and providing active support to increase the productivity of faculty research and scholarship. So I started off working with Virtual Reality in the last two years, year and a half. We started off at the MSU library doing what a lot of other libraries have started off with, which is things like providing hardware and software for Virtual Reality. We have a dedicated space and rather small. If you look at something like Oklahoma, like Cliff mentioned, they have a lot more space dedicated than we do. But we have a space that people can use, some HTC Vive hardware sets. I have since acquired additional 10 oculus quest headsets that I can take out into classrooms and partner with faculty in that way. So we're providing that space, the hardware, the software, starting to provide more instruction on the use of Virtual Reality. I've built up a lot of expertise on who's the Virtual Reality person on campus that somebody might want to contact if they're in computer science versus film and photography versus architecture. We have some libraries out there who are helping with Virtual Reality content development. We are doing that at MSU, but it's not specifically through the libraries, through a library partner. There are a lot of libraries who are looking at ways to preserve locally created VR content. The link I have here is an example about preserving augmented Virtual Reality materials. There are opportunities for the creation of 3D and VR models, objects, and texts, and things from your special collections and archives. And then finally, research opportunities. So I was in a space where I was helping faculty, helping students, and they just naturally led to conversations where I started seeing a lot of potential. And I am not an expert in this area. I'm an emerging, interested person. So I'm hoping some of you might have other ideas other than the ones I presented here, or you may know other partnerships that I haven't highlighted. But I think there's an exciting opportunity for libraries to partner with each other, but also to partner with our other entities on our campuses or more broadly through consortia to be a part of those research teams. So I mentioned the Ithaca SNR post, and I'm trying to think of bigger than the library. So Virtual Reality has implications for what libraries can do and how it can help the library. But it also could be ways that we can go outside the library into the classroom, into the lab, into the field, and be a partner in those areas. So the library does the traditional activity that we do of providing services and resources, but we also are really good at being the place that people know. So somebody comes to me and I say, I can't do that for you, but I can help you get for the person who does. Or I can say to somebody, you want to do that? OK, I can help you do that with this equipment or the software. I can help people tell their stories through the VR that they create, the 360 video that they create. I can help preserve that heritage. And then I can also be a partner in advancing research and science. So at MSU, we have three entities that are primarily focused on providing VR support and development. We have our Academic Technology and Outreach Branch, which has a teaching and learning technology studio where faculty can go in and explore VR technologies that they might want to adapt for the classroom. So this is kind of a hands-on place where you can put on the equipment and try out different things. And then in the library, we have what's called the Virtual Discovery Space, which is reservable. It's reservable as students, faculty, staff. We've had faculty work with us to reserve the space for their classes. So students come in groups of two or three. They take turns using the VR. We help keep track that they actually did their assignment. And then they're able to report back to their instructor on their experience there. And then students also use the VR equipment just on their own for a variety of possibilities. And then the University Information Technology has the Montana Reality Lab, which just opened this past spring. And that is focused more on developing VR. So they've got applications for making VR for. And it mostly came out of film and photography and architecture. So it's located in an architecture classroom building. So in there, they're really focused on that angle of VR. And so one of the things I did is I pulled together these different groups. And I made a web page for our three groups because what I was finding is the students were coming to me and saying, who's teaching in this? I have faculty saying, if I want to adapt this, who can I talk to? And so I felt my strength as a librarian is why when I make people try to hunt for this information, let's get this under one umbrella and then people don't have to keep trying to shop. So I'm going to switch real quickly and just show you that web page that I just mentioned. So this is the landing page. We've got a link for each of the three spaces I just mentioned. We also have a list of the different classes that we're teaching VR as of this last spring. And then we also have a page with various personnel that I've identified who are potential contacts. So this might seem silly, but the number of contacts I've gotten as a result of this web page and I have myself listed as the main contact down here. I talked to everybody else and they said, sure, go ahead. And so I'm putting myself as a first contact and I refer people or I pull together partners as appropriate. So I'm going to switch back to my slides. So I'm just going to give you some examples of ways that I've seen that we could partner or that we are partnering. And I'm hoping that you all will talk with me more about these ideas. So one of the areas I have of interest is about using VR for mitigating bias within libraries. So I've been working with a computer science professor. I'm going to jump ahead of Slash for a minute just to make sure I've got this right. Okay. So the example I saw is a faculty member I've been working with, she's in computer science and she was able, and actually I can see that there's chat. I just want to make sure that I'm understanding if anybody's chatting with me. Okay. Sorry, I haven't been in the presenter environment in Zoom before, just the participant environment. So going back, I've been working with a computer science professor who was looking at bias in computer science. And so she was trying to help get students to understand when our biases influence our behavior. And she said that, and she initially taught that class for students basically said, we don't have biases. And so she was like, well, what, you definitely have biases. And so she ended up having them work in a software environment called Equal Reality where they would go into an environment in VR and they would have an avatar that looked like a specific demographic. And then you would experience things as that person and then you would experience things as other people in that demographic. So for example, there's one exercise I go through where somebody comes in in a wheelchair and you see how people talk to him and they say, oh, you know, oh, that's great. You should be so proud. And it's a very demoralizing experience to see how this man is treated. So I thought it'd be interesting to think about what does it look like to be an avatar with a library? So if somebody walked into a virtual space as an avatar and then you are an avatar, suddenly the dynamics change because you don't know what that person really looks like and they don't know what you really look like and maybe you're meeting on this surface of the moon rather than in the library and maybe your library is on the surface of the moon. So there's just a lot of interesting potential ways of understanding how when we are together how do we interpret each other just based on all those visual cues. I think one of the things that's still a challenge in this environment is as we've seen in this pandemic situation is there are still inequalities when you have a virtual reality space. You may eliminate some of the inequalities with appearances and things but you may still surface them because people still need access to the internet or virtual reality equipment. Maybe people have disabilities in an online environment that make it difficult for them to participate. So the same instructor that I was just talking about. So I've been working with her to actually see whether or not we can figure out ways that we can test the user experience in a virtual library. So that's where I was going with that. We are a little bit off with that because we were gonna be working on that this summer and I'm not exactly sure what that looks like. She's also doing some research into counseling. So she's presenting counselors to people in a remote virtual reality environment who need the counselor right away. The reasons they might need that counselor right away is because perhaps they're remote or at a distance. Maybe they have immobility issues. Maybe they don't have the financial resources to be able to come into town and pay for parking and see a counselor face to face. And maybe they've got pressing time issues like suicidal thoughts. So she was providing at some high at-risk patients with this virtual reality equipment and then providing the counselors and seeing how that would help those people when they aren't able to come and visit a counselor in person. So that led me to the idea of what does that mean for libraries? I mean, could we end up being remote librarians in a virtual reality environment when people need help right away? And I realize there's a difference between suicidal thoughts and needing help from the librarian right away. But I do think that there are times where being in a library can be intimidating. It could be prohibitive because of time. Maybe you are too far away. Maybe you're taking a distance class. Maybe you have those time constraints I mentioned. So what are the possibilities for us to be in a virtual reality environment where people can find us just when they need us? Another study I thought was interesting is out of the University of Nevada, Reno. They did a virtual reality study where they were looking at how communication happens in a rural, I mean in a medical setting. And so they put people into this virtual reality environment and everybody can see what's going on who's participating in that but you end up seeing how doctors are communicating, nurses, people at the reception and patients. And sometimes you'll see communication points break down. Maybe inconsistent information for the patient. Maybe not asking the questions that needed to be asked to get the proper diagnosis. So it's basically they were trying to understand how patient experience is and how information is gathered and communicated. So I think that has real implications for the library. Could we study what it's like to be a patron going through our spaces? So maybe enter a virtual library. You watch them trying to find personnel, maybe get the attention or understand where they're going. As we know, a lot of like library users will wander around or they don't initiate things. So do we see them asking questions or being approached by personnel to be asked if they need anything? How do they get their answers and is that consistent? And then finally, how do they access the information that they've been presented with? Another study is the Citizen Science Study with Project E-TROUT. So this is out of the US Geological Survey. So they had some cameras that they inserted into water, into streams and rivers. And those underwater cameras recorded trout populations going in front of the cameras. And so then they crowdsourced and worked with libraries to help count the trout. And so what they were trying to do is understand how many trout were going past a specific spot. And they were also trying to understand how good people were at counting those things. So they found that the trout were usually counted consistently by people, relatively speaking, like the error rate was pretty consistent. The error rates tended to be higher for younger people. So who knows what that is? Maybe it's an attention span thing, I don't know. But anyway, I think that has really interesting implications for research. I mean, it's one thing to provide a VR headset for teaching, but it's another thing to provide that to help gather data for science and have citizens participating in that research project because we presented the spaces, the hardware, and the opportunities for partnership with those research studies. And along with that, I think there are interesting questions about human subjects right now. People are trying to study human subjects. How are they going to do that when we're supposed to be social distancing? So I think there are also implications for ways we can study human subjects in a virtual reality. Environment and libraries could be a really good conduit to helping figure out this protocol. And then we have another case study at MSU. So we had the MSU student chapter of Engineers Without Borders. They came to me because they knew about the virtual reality space in the library. And then they looked at our website and got my contact information. And they were interested in potentially using virtual reality for Engineers Without Borders. So they came to me. And I pulled together partners from across campus from film and photography, from RU, IT, information technology, and the library. And then the Engineers Without Borders students to find out about their project. They were interested in mapping a new school library in Kenya where they regularly work. And I didn't put this here, but they also were working on a new bathroom latrine setup. So they were interested in mapping that, perhaps using CAD or other technologies that could be viewed through a virtual reality environment so that they could see ahead of time what they were thinking of, but also so they could share that back with their contacts in Kenya before they get there and start seeing if there are adjustments that need to be made that they couldn't find out unless they actually showed them some kind of 3D rendering. And then they were interested in doing storytelling. So they were interested in doing 360 videos to tell the story of their community so that when they go there, they can do a 360 video and then show it to their communities and their potential donors to say, this is what it's like to live in this community in Kenya. And then we are also looking at preserving the videos that they're going to be making over the summer. Well, they were going to be making over the summer probably. Whenever they go back there, we'll be preserving the videos that they make and I'm hosting those through the library. So going back to my original concepts here, thinking about the Ithaca SNR blog post, that virtual reality has opportunity to be bigger than the library. So not just providing the services but providing connections. And going by on those traditional activities, we can pull people together, help them find new ways to innovate through our technologies and the connections they can make and help them tell their stories about Kenya and other places and preserving that heritage and then advancing research and science through things like the project E-Trap I offered. So at this point, like I said, I'm not an expert but I would love to build some expertise and I'd love to hear from you all about thoughts you have about possibilities and opportunities for libraries with virtual reality, augmented reality and 360 video and related technologies. Thanks, Doralyn. Thank you. Thanks so much for that really interesting overview of what you've been working on at MSU and as Doralyn invited our attendees, I'd just like to remind you, we would love to hear from you and hear your questions, any comments you have to share. If you know of any other partnerships that other folks might be interested in hearing about, we invite you now to go ahead and type those into the Q&A box. There should be a little icon at the bottom of your screen that says Q&A. If you click on that, you can type in your questions into the Q&A or you can type them into the chat box and I'll be happy to moderate those now. I was wondering, Doralyn, while we're waiting for our attendees to weigh in with some of their questions, what is the staffing like for these services in the library? Who do you have? That's a good question. When we started off with the space that we had, we had some virtual reality equipment. Well, actually the space we had was originally supposed to be a data visualization wall and that was problematic because it was staffed by our campus IT, but then they got moved to a different location and they weren't co-located with us. Anyway, so we ended up installing this virtual reality equipment and again, we still didn't feel that we had a common understanding of that space and I actually just finished writing up an article for evidence-based librarianship and practice because last summer we ended up doing, all right, let's regroup. What's the space? Who's using it? How can we make it better? So we developed for the space a mission and vision statement. We looked at how it would integrate with the library strategic plan. We developed some case studies so that the faculty comes along, we can say this is how you could use a space we say, oh student, this is how you could use the space. We updated our webpage, we updated the signage and now we have a self-guided online tutorial. We have a manual in the space and then we're available to make appointments. So it's pretty much standalone. Our service desk loans out the equipment to people. They can check it out for up to four hours. They can re-preserve the space through an online calendar and I have a student who works for me for 20 hours a week and his hours are posted so people can come in when he's there or he can meet with them by appointment. So it's mostly self-run but the ones that are self-run are people who are coming in and they know what they're doing after they've done it once and then the students and then other people who are wanting to incorporate this in a class usually will meet with me. Interesting, okay, thank you for that clarification. We have a question now. What are some of your strategies and how did you go about building relationships with the VR experts and faculty on your campus towards the beginning? Okay, that's a great question. I found that the VR experts on campus tended to be in isolation a bit. So you know, you get one computer scientist is working on it, one film and photography and professor, one architecture professor. And they've just sort of figured out as they've gone along too. So they seem to be really glad to find anybody who is willing to talk with them. And I actually ended up initially the computer science professor. She came to me because she didn't have enough space in her classroom to do what she wanted to do with VR and asked about using our space. So I ended up working with her for this bias class scheduling. And then I asked her out to lunch. We ended up talking more about this bias work. And so we ended up, we're planning to try to pursue some grants to try to pursue that more to understand the whole bias of computer science in the library. I got together our panel. So I asked those professors I just mentioned if they'd be willing to participate in a panel conversation. And then I took my equivalents in academic technology and outreach and UIT. So it was a seven-person panel of five of us who were faculty and two others who were staff just talking about their VR experiences. And then we had people from nursing and biochemistry and other people show up. And again, we just started having a conversation. So I feel like it really wasn't that hard in the sense that I figured out who was teaching on campus. Some of those people approached me as soon as they saw a space. And I was trying to be helpful to them and their immediate needs. And then asking them like, oh, tell me more about what you're doing. And then that opened up opportunities to start forming even stronger partnerships. And the other thing I would say is you need to go in and learn the equipment. Like I just put on the headset and just started finding my way around. I mean, if you aren't willing to try the VR equipment it's kind of hard to talk about it. So I figured out a lot on my own, which has been good because that gives me a little more expertise than just getting somebody else to show me how to do it. So I think that it's a little bit just taking initiative on your own for the technology. It sounds like you're starting to build a little community of practice there as well, for sure. And I think, again, I think that's where librarians have a lot of strength. It's good at bringing people together. The IT people are not as strong at that in my community. They're glad to participate. But I think the fact that I'm faculty makes it easier to just in some of the same conversations already with those folks. Interesting. Great, great question. Thanks so much for that. And thanks for your response, Darlene. And now from Cliff. Cliff is asking if you could say a bit more about your work in preserving VR content and how are you making selections and what approach are you using? Well, so we're just at the beginning of that conversation. I naively said in a meeting recently we were looking at creating a VR experience for a student who had an art show and normally she would have a gallery opening and she was realizing that she couldn't do that in a situation where people were told they're not allowed to be on campus. So this summer we're gonna be working with her to try to get that gallery experience in a VR setting, which is gonna be kind of a pretty cool pilot project, I think. And I said, oh, we definitely would preserve that. And then I walked away and I was like, I don't know what I've just said. So I looked into it and I was like, oh, this is a lot more complicated than I think I thought I needed. So I don't have the answer for you yet of how we're going to preserve that VR content, but I like the idea that I'm getting this at the beginning because we're just now building VR content on campus. And so it's on people's radars that we definitely wanna keep this. We wanna put it on a website. We wanna have something to show to say this is what MSU is putting out with VR. These are the kinds of things you could make if you came to MSU. One of the areas that I have been working to preserve is 360 video, which is a lot easier to preserve, but we have our film and photography faculty building 360 video with our students. Some of them are going out to Yellowstone National Park doing 360 video there. So that's a win-win because you get to see the environment, you get to see film and photography and action, and then you get to see some of what's coming out of MSU. So for that video, we're preserving that. We have a lot of our videos through our YouTube channel and we have them backed up locally. So we had a faculty member who was putting some of this on his own website through Vimeo and so we've just captured redundancies at those videos from him and his students. So the VR content preservation is a little more challenging for sure. One of the things I've also found that people have done is they've preserved physical objects more through a virtual reality environment. So perhaps you have a fragile text, you can make that into a virtual reality text and then people aren't physically handling the original. So you see a lot of that with artwork and other things in the virtual reality apps out there as well. So there's some possibility to preserve the VR content but also to preserve real materials in a VR environment. Yeah, yeah, interesting. I put the question out to our attendees if anyone on the webinar today has experienced with this, it would be lovely to hear what you have to share about how you've dealt with the preservation question. And Cliff just wanted me to share also his thanks for the answer and I hope that you, he says, I hope you'll update us on your experiences as you progress on this preservation work. Yeah, I think there's a lot of potential there. It does not seem I'm the first to wonder how to do that but I don't, there haven't been, that's practices established for preserving VR apps, VR content that I think we should be there. So I think as a community you need to figure out standards and approaches to those kinds of questions. So true. And just as a follow on to that call to our attendees, I'd like to point out that with this webinar environment we have the capacity to unmute you. So if you're interested in making a comment, sharing your experiences live with us here or asking a question live, just raise your hand. There should be a button that allows you to raise your virtual hand and that will indicate that you're interested in making a live comment. So I'll give folks just a little bit of time there if they wanna type in more questions or raise their hand. And while we're waiting, I just wanted to share with you the direct link to the CNI spring virtual meeting schedule, the CNI's virtual spring meeting is continuing on through the end of May. So we have quite a lot of sessions yet to come. You can check out the schedule there, register for those webinars using the link we sent you by email. And we hope that you will join us for many more of the offerings we have yet to come. Again, thanks to Doralyn for coming to CNI and sharing your experiences live with us here today. For coming to CNI and sharing your work with us today, it's just really interesting. And also to our attendees for making time to be with us today.