Students from the University of Oklahoma and the University of Arizona recently toured a cave bedecked with rare and delicate Southwestern Native American art, notes a Library Journal article. This, even though the cave location was secret, to preserve the centuries-old artwork.
Why is the article in Library Journal? It was because the 15 students toured this protected site remotely, using virtual reality technology, courtesy of their libraries. This is just another sign of the times. In the past few years, libraries have gone from primarily lending books and records to sponsoring all sorts of new electronic activities, such as enabling software downloads and providing internet access training.
Now libraries are entering the world of bleeding-edge virtual reality tech. JoVE, with the rest of the publishing industry, just celebrated National Library Week, an event much publicized in social media. The various week’s activities weren’t limited to just author appearances, but also included tutorials in how to use Snapchat to reach the 18-24 year old demographic, among other events.
These activities give us some insight into how dynamic, wide, and varied the library industry really is.
Librarian Relevance Changes With New Tech
Are the people that staff these multidisciplinary facilities just librarians now? These academic professionals appear to be doing so much more than just curating books, periodicals and documents. More and more, their role is changing to enable their academic colleagues and the study body to succeed.
We know our JoVE librarian clients do quite a lot besides just being knowledge gatekeepers. In fact, they:
- Assist innovators in their research efforts via scientific publication subscriptions
- Create collaborative spaces
- Secure impactful video teaching materials
- Work to beat the science reproducibility crisis
- Attempt to help labs better manage research and other data
And more. All this, despite, in some cases, shrinking budgets and a radically transformed work environment.
Arming Librarians With Success Tools
One of JoVE’s objectives is to help librarians succeed. With us, you can provide video platforms to educate and train your patrons in the sciences. Do you have researchers who must make their labs more productive? Or that are concerned about the accuracy of the protocols they follow? Think JoVE Video Journal.
Are there engineering, biology, chemistry or other departments that want to improve student performance? Have you seen the JoVE Science Education Library? It’s proven to help students perform better in the lab.
We know that your job as librarian is changing: And we want the change to always be for the better.
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