IARLA, the International Alliance of Research Library Associations, invites colleagues from across the world to join us on 25 October 2022 for an international sprint relay symposium on Creating a community-driven toolkit for the development and delivery of Virtual Reading Room services.

This event is free to attend, and is open to all colleagues with a professional interest in, or experience of developing and delivering virtual reading room services. The event will be hosted on the Pheedloop and Zoom platforms.

Register for this event here

Virtual Reading Rooms (VRRs) provide human mediated, real time consultations primarily for unique and distinctive collections which are not loanable or digitised. Via visualisers and online video conferencing platforms, VRRs provide a surrogate research experience, initial scoping of collections prior to digitisation or an in person visit, or a means of co-locating joint research for distributed collaborators.

This international symposium will span the globe through a series of three connected, sequential, and iterative seminars. There will be talks, discussions, and interactive breakout sessions that will all directly inform and shape the contents of a practical toolkit for the development and delivery of Virtual Reading Room services amongst collection-holding institutions.

How to participate

Attendees will only need to join one sprint session: in Australia and New Zealand, Europe or North America. Timings for each sprint are provided below. You will be asked to confirm which sprint you will attend in the registration form.

This event is open to all and is NOT restricted to colleagues located in the named regions. Attendees based outside of the named regions are encouraged to sign up and should join the sprint that matches up to their particular time zone.

Our sprint relay will commence in Australia and New Zealand

  • 10:00 – 14:00 AWST
  • 13:00 – 17:00 AEDT
  • 15:00 – 19:00 NZDT

Before the baton is passed to Europe:

  • 09:00 -13:00 BST, WEST
  • 10:00 – 14:00 CEST
  • 11:00 – 15:00 EEST

And we will finish the relay in North America:

  • 11:00 -15:00 EDT
  • 08:00 – 12:00 PDT

This international relay symposium will:

  • Showcase the international experience around the development and delivery of VRRs
  • Produce a toolkit which genuinely reflects the experiences of the community and our wider stakeholders

This event has been organised by members of IARLA’s VRR Working Group that has been meeting since November 2021 to explore the development and delivery of virtual reading rooms. The working group includes representatives of research and academic libraries from Australia and New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States.

Register for this event here

RLUK has published the following reports on the development and use of Virtual Reading Rooms by collection holding institutions: