Capturing the experience of immersive digital scholarship
For decades, universities and libraries have been investigating and investing in emerging and immersive technology. From virtual reality headsets to large-scale visualization walls to 360-degree projection spaces, we are attempting to create the means by which researchers (faculty and students) can push the traditional boundaries of scholarly output and classroom pedagogy. Yet what happens to these projects after they are presented? Where can past and new users find them?
The North Carolina State University Libraries is known for our ongoing investment in emerging immersive technology, particularly as implemented throughout the James B. Hunt Jr. Library. Since opening in 2013, the building and technology therein has hosted numerous exhibits, lectures, and unique site-specific content in spaces like the Teaching & Visualization Lab, Creativity Studio, and Game Lab. In 2021, as a part of the D. H. Hill Jr. Library renovations, we opened the Visualization Studio, a round room with 360-degree projection and 7.1 surround sound capabilities.
In the early years of the Hunt Library, the focus was on generating and displaying content in order to demonstrate capabilities and inspire more content creation. The need and urgency of creating immersive, technology-rich experiences — projects using multiple high-definition projectors and surround sound — did not leave time to consider what happens to that scholarly and creative work after it is displayed. And because AV technology (and technology in general) has a relatively short lifespan, we are in a phased, multi-year refresh cycle.
Besides needing to maintain the equipment and systems, what are other implications of having these spaces? As an academic library, it is our mission to amplify the research and scholarly impact of faculty, students, and researchers. We assist with citation management, find journals in which users can publish, help with research metrics, provide access to theses and dissertations, and much more. However, helping faculty, students, and researchers get documented credit for non-textual, site-specific, digital work is a persistent conundrum. These projects are very site-specific, as they are formatted for our unique software, hardware, and equipment configuration. It is likely that the presentation would not look or sound the same in another immersive technology space or online. In fact, the project might not display similarly in its original space once the technology is upgraded. At that point, collaborators, having graduated or left the institution, may be unavailable to reformat the project assets. Providing access and citing the project becomes tricky.
Unlike traditional forms of scholarship, projects designed for technology-rich spaces may consist of multiple components, types of media, and file formats. Consider the Virtual Martin Luther King, Jr. Project, an immersive reenactment of Dr. King’s “A Creative Protest (Fill Up the Jails)” speech that he gave in Durham, NC, in response to student-led sit-ins and protests across the state in 1960. The project includes but is not limited to a website, virtual reality application, audio and video recordings, presentations, articles, and curricular materials. Given that it is a grant-funded, interdisciplinary collaboration that began in 2015, many faculty, students, and library staff have contributed to creating the many digital assets that make up this project.
Highly collaborative works, such as the Virtual Martin Luther King, Jr. Project, which occur over a number of years and in different modalities, urge us to think about how site-specific research projects can be discovered beyond our physical spaces. A few examples of how such projects can persist are: an online exhibit; GitHub repository; and documentation stored on a project management platform, such as the Open Science Framework (OSF). However, even if a project can be experienced on a website or presented in another physical space, the materials need to be made sustainable for the short and long terms. For library staff, this calls for being responsible stewards of project files on our servers. For creators, this means making changes to their projects as we make software and hardware upgrades in our spaces. Depending on the project, ensuring sustainability could involve updating deprecated code and dependencies in software. File management across shared cloud and physical storage is also important. Last but not least, metadata — structured information that facilitates discovery of the resource — and documentation should be actively maintained.
As a part of supporting discovery of these projects outside our campuses, documenting collaborators should be approached with care. Students and faculty may need a clear way to indicate their contribution to a project when applying for tenure and promotion, a grant, graduate school, or even a job. This can be challenging. These projects are often interdisciplinary, and there may be a lack of precedence for how to document contributions to these projects for tenure review. Some forms of labor may be invisible, like software development or relationship building. Fortunately, there have been efforts to intentionally document and better represent different kinds of labor. For example, there are taxonomies that project leads can use to assign roles in project documentation. This includes CRediT (Contributor Roles Taxonomy), a standard currently being formalized by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO), and TaDiRAH (Taxonomy of Digital Research Activities in the Humanities). Ultimately, some users may not prioritize project dissemination or contributorship, but when they invest time in learning how to design for these one-of-a-kind spaces, library staff should make them aware of the options for contributorship.
While it is first and foremost the role of library staff to support faculty and students in providing access to their work, another one of our goals is demonstrating and extending the value of the immersive technology spaces in our libraries. We want to show new users demos and examples of different projects, and illustrate how these spaces are for everyone at NC State, regardless of discipline or technical experience. Once we have captured the experience of these technology-rich spaces, we can inspire more users from a variety of backgrounds to create work there. We will also become better stewards of our own institutional knowledge. Countless library staff have maintained the technology and offered their expertise, fostering a community of practice over the years. We want to continue sharing and building upon this knowledge to support the NC State community for years to come.
The set-up and hardware in technology-rich spaces will differ between institutions. Despite that, we have been providing generalizable, tech-agnostic takeaways from operating these spaces for nearly a decade. We hope these will be useful not only for libraries and others who support the research life cycle, but also faculty and students. In the next post, we examine changes NC State University Libraries made to assist creators with the latter part of that life cycle — access and preservation of project files — or put another way, being a part of the scholarly record and having their research make an impact on society.
