VIRTUAL FRONTIERS: MANAGING 3D AND VIRTUAL REALITY CONTENT AND SYSTEMS IN GEOSCIENCE LIBRARIES

The advent of affordable and accessible virtual reality systems presents many opportunities for the geoscience librarian to support new ways of teaching, researching, and producing content in the geosciences. While geoscience libraries can use virtual reality to help students and researchers visualize data, develop spatial literacy and supplement field work with virtual experiences, many libraries are still in the conceptual stages of exploring these possibilities. In practice, implementing virtual reality in the library comes with many challenges and choices that librarians must consider before implementation, including staffing, space, services, and collection management, as geoscience faculty and students produce 3D content that must be preserved and made findable for other users. This presentation will explore the possibilities and issues represented by this new information resource, and how librarians can integrate it into the geoscience library. We will share examples of the kinds of 3D and virtual reality content that geoscience faculty and students are producing, and how research libraries can incorporating virtual reality into their services and collections.