The Virtual Reading Room: thinking globally, acting locally

The University of Melbourne and Sydney Libraries in Australia have unparalleled collections of special, rare and archival collections in the national academic library landscape. Both institutions are driven by the same ambition; to maximise engagement and use of these unique collection to further global scholarship.  During the peak of the global pandemic physical access to collections was limited which led to the development of digital solutions to provide a minimum level of access for scholars. On emerging from lockdowns, we engaged in a range of reflective practices about how we may transform and evolve service models in direct response to changing expectations of access for global scholars and regional communities, in particular Indigenous communities but also in tandem strengthen global professional networks. Over the last year, in partnership, the libraries at Melbourne and Sydney have developed distinctive and different approaches to piloting two new service models; Virtual Reading Room (VRR) and Virtual Teaching Space (VTS) which has been informed by the global practice emerging through the Research Libraries UK (RLUK) and International Alliance of Research Library Association (IARLA). This presentation will outline our motivations for exploring these service models and the benefits we see them realising. In addition, we will outline the power of strong and strategic partnerships across university libraries in developing new service models to increase the visibility and engagement with unique and distinctive collections for local and global communities

Virtual Reading Room service guide

This document was written as part of a collaboration between the University of Sydney and the University of Melbourne. It is designed as a service guide for a library, gallery, museum or archive intending on starting a Virtual Reading Room service. A Virtual Reading Room service provides access to Rare Books and Special Collections materials remotely in real-time, allowing clients to access items without having to travel or wait for specialist digitisation. The VRR service also gives access to collections that cannot be lent via traditional inter-library loan

Managing Risk with a Virtual Reading Room: Two Born Digital Projects

In March 2010, the University of California, Irvine, launched a site to provide online access to papers of Richard Rorty in the form of a virtual reading room.1 Although we didn’t know it then, we quickly learned that we were one of the first academic repositories in the United States to risk providing remote, online access to born-digital manuscripts. The virtual reading room mitigated the risks involved in providing this kind of access to personal, archival materials with privacy and copyright issues by limiting the number of qualified users and by limiting the discoverability of full-text content on the open web. In January 2013, we launched a site providing access to another group of born-digital materials, the papers of Mark Poster. The two collections had as many differences as they did commonalities, and a comparison of the two projects is useful for understanding the range of decisions and issues that ultimately impact access to born-digital personal manuscript collections

Educator`s Virtual Reading Room of V. O. Sukhomlynskyi SSPL of Ukraine

У тезах презентовано Віртуальний читальний зал освітянина ДНПБ України ім. В. О. Сухомлинського.The article presents the Educator`s Virtual Reading Room of V. O. Sukhomlynskyi SSPL of Ukraine

Designing the Born-Digital Archive

Light spoke generally about the major issues facing archivists who manage born digital records and how the UCI Libraries responded when providing access to the Richard Rorty papers. She discussed the challenges, such as dealing with rapid technological change, ensure present and future accessibility of legacy files, managing privacy and copyrights, guaranteeing the authenticity and integrity of files, preventing loss and destruction, and selecting the most important material for preservation. She also discussed numerous decisions archivists make that impact the future archive, such as emulation or preservation of the original computing environment, the organization of files, the migration of materials to new formats, and human or machine-generated description of the materials. She concluded with a description of the UCI Libraries\u27 Digital Scholarship Service, which endeavors to help faculty manage their digital research for future generations

The Intricacies of Capturing the Holdings of a Mosque Library in Yemen: The Library of the Shrine of Imām al-Hādī, Ṣaʿda

This article discusses the The Zaydi Manuscript Tradition (ZMT) initiative. The initiative aims to salvage the Zaydi literary tradition by gathering digital surrogates of as many Zaydi manuscripts as possible in a single repository and providing comprehensive and systematic open access to them for scholars worldwide, regardless of whether the physical manuscripts are preserved in Europe or in North America, in Yemen or elsewhere in the Middle East. The ZMT is a joint project initiated by the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS), Princeton, in partnership with the Hill Museum & Manuscript Library (HMML) at Saint John’s University, Collegeville, Minnesota. Work on the ZMT began in September 2016 and to date the project comprises some 1,000 digitized manuscripts from several European and Yemeni libraries which are accessible online through the project\u27s Portal and HMML\u27s virtual reading room

MS-293: Gillilan Family Letters

This collection contains approximately 90 letters written by various letters of the Gillilan family, including Lewis, his parents, wife, and children. The bulk of the letters are written by Lewis between 1909 and 1910, but there are also a significant amount written by his daughter, Lois, in 1939. These letters provide insight into the life of a stagecoach driver and a young woman studying medicine in Europe during the rise of the Nazi party, amongst other things. Many of the early letters also depict Lewis and Ellen navigating their personal relationship as it was contested by their families. All of the letters in this collection have been transcribed and the transcriptions are housed within the S Drive Student Folders. A few of the letters are available on GettDigital in the Virtual Reading Room. Special Collections and College Archives Finding Aids are discovery tools used to describe and provide access to our holdings. Finding aids include historical and biographical information about each collection in addition to inventories of their content. More information about our collections can be found on our website https://www.gettysburg.edu/special-collections/collections/.https://cupola.gettysburg.edu/findingaidsall/1227/thumbnail.jp

Virtual Reading Room of the Employee of Education of V. Sukhomlynskyi State Scientific and Pedagogical Library of Ukraine

Метою діяльності віртуального читального залу є його долучення до мережевого контенту не лише у вітчизняному, а й глобальному освітньому просторі задля акумуляції електронних інформаційних ресурсів у єдину систему/базу знань з питань науково-педагогічної діяльності, вдосконалення й розширення науково-інформаційного обслуговування користувачів, надання їм віддаленого доступу до електронних ресурсів (документів) освітянської спрямованості.The purpose of the virtual reading room is to include it in the network content not only in the domestic, but also in the global educational space in order to accumulate electronic information resources into a single system/knowledge base on scientific and pedagogical activities, to improve and expand the scientific and informational service for users, to provide them remote access to educational electronic resources (documents)

RUANG BACA VIRTUAL (RBV) DAN BAHAN AJAR (BA) DIGITAL SEBAGAI MEDIA PEMBELAJARAN JARAK JAUH

Virtual Reading Room (RBV) and Digital Learning Materials (BA Digital) are forms of learning service provided by Universitas Terbuka (UT). RBV and BA digital are digitizations of the Main Material Book (BMP) developed to help students read modules through the internet network. The existence of RBV and BA digital is expected to assist the students learning process, independently, even for students living in  remote area. This study describes the benefits, as well as the limitations of RBV and BA digital according to students perspective from 17 regional office (UPBJJ-UT) in Indonesia and overseas. This study is written using quantitative descriptive approach. The findings shows that  99% of respondents are aware of the existence of RBV and BA digital. Half of the respondents are aware of these two digital teaching materials from UT's website. The 53% respondents studied RBV and BA digital for less than 30 minutes, and more than sixty percent of the respondents accessed and used it during the tutorials.   Ruang Baca Virtual (RBV) dan BA digital merupakan salah satu bentuk layanan belajar yang disediakan oleh Universitas Terbuka (UT). RBV dan BA digital merupakan digitalisasi dari Buku Materi Pokok (BMP) yang dikembangkan untuk membantu mahasiswa membaca modul melalui jaringan internet. Dengan adanya RBV dan BA digital diharapkan dapat membantu proses pembelajaran secara mandiri dan jarak jauh bagi mahasiswa UT. Artikel ini akan memaparkan tentang manfaat RBV dan BA digital dalam perspektif mahasiswa pada 17 UPBJJ-UT (Indonesia dan Luar Negri), sehingga dapat diketahui kelebihan dan kelemahannya. Artikel ini ditulis berdasarkan hasil penelitian dengan pendekatan deskriptif kuantitatif. Berdasarkan data yang yang diperoleh diketahui bahwa 99% responden telah mengetahui adanya RBV dan BA digital. Setengah dari jumlah responden mengetahui kedua bahan ajar digital tersebut dari laman website UT. Sebanyak 53% responden mempelajari RBV dan BA digital selama kurang dari 30 menit, dan lebih dari 60 persen responden mengaksesnya saat tutorial

Information and Communication Technologies as means for self-improvement at remote universities: the example of Urgench State University, Uzbekistan

This paper describes the research conducted at the Information Resource Center of Urgench State University, located in the Khorezm region of Uzbekistan, on the possibilities and challenges the students and lecturers face in their pursuit for self-improvement and self-education. The article discloses new qualitative approaches and IT methods in the teaching and educational processes in higher education of Central Asian countries in transition, the overall aim of which is to close the gap and shape the spiritual values of the young generation in the globalizing world. The framework conditions for this have been set by the Government of Uzbekistan through particular Decrees, aiming at the creation of e-education at universities and institutions throughout the country and specifically in the remote regions as to improve the access to regularly updated information, to motivate the use of IT in classes as well as to enhance the responsibility of the information services of universities for assuring the quality of research and teaching (pedagogical) activities of the lecturers. The research showed that the Internet can function inter alia as a controlling device when education is delivered through the web. Collection, analysis and preparation of educational-methodological materials on specific subjects and extracurricular activities require specific knowledge on IT and information literacy both in the teaching staff and the students