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Abstract: “When VR Was New”: Understanding Student Encounters with an Emerging Library Technology
The moment of emergence of a new media technology has historically brought with it diverse and conflicting visions of what it means, how it should be used, and how it fits into existing technological landscapes. Emerging technologies, such as virtual reality (VR) and 3D printing have been increasingly integrated into library spaces, coinciding with a growing interest in expanding makerspaces and other innovation labs in libraries. With the release of inexpensive VR headsets in 2015, an increasing number of libraries and other institutions have been experimenting with these technologies for teaching and research purposes. Understanding innovation in libraries requires looking at the needs and experiences of various stakeholder groups and the discourses that shape their understandings of emerging technologies. This paper retrospectively analyzes interview and “think-aloud” data generated with undergraduate students in 2017 (at a large public university in the central U.S.) concerning their initial experiences encountering VR technologies in an academic library-based instructional context. With some historical distance from the moment of VR’s emergence within libraries, this paper examines the narratives and cognitive frames students use to make sense of this new media technology. Findings from the study offer theoretical insights into how undergraduate students engage with new technologies at historical moments of emergence of new media formats, with practical implications for designing VR services that support a range of users in libraries. Understanding how students experience new technologies at their initial time of deployment in library contexts offers practical insights for developing library strategies to promote the use of other emerging technologies in innovation initiatives. The paper argues for the use of qualitative methods and the interpretation of qualitative data using phenomenological analysis, within a theoretical framework of historical media emergence and technological innovation, as a means for understanding the use of new library technologies in the changing academic library landscape.