Digital Spaces Exhibition. Photo © Hayley Salter

What is the role of public libraries in developing technology? Fiona Morris, Chief Executive and Creative Director of The Space and Dave Lloyd, Service Development Manager, Coventry Libraries, explain how the Digital Spaces in Libraries Programme (which launched in January and runs for 18 months) aims to transform the way communities interact with digital creativity.

THE idea that technology is best understood by its creators is epitomised by a quote attributed to car maker Henry Ford: “If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses.”

But including people in the development process not only helps keep technology relevant but explores its potential – Thomas Edison, for example, only saw his sound recording device as a dictation tool for office workers, not something that would transform the entertainment industry.

What role the public should have in developing how technology is used and improved is a key aspect of the recently launched Digital Spaces in Libraries Programme which uses virtual reality and training to help communities understand how to interact with and influence technology.

The project activities range from Virtual Reality (VR) experiences and immersive filmmaking masterclasses to funding opportunities for creating new digital content.

Nine library services are taking part: Bradford, Cambridgeshire, Coventry, Leeds, Manchester, Newham, Nottinghamshire (Inspire), Somerset, and Sunderland.

“New technologies need to be as inclusive and representative as possible,” says, Fiona Morris, Chief Executive of The Space – which is coordinating the programme, an expanded version of Digital Spaces which ran in Coventry in 2021. “But when new technologies come along, they can feel very baffling to certain demographic age groups.

“Public libraries are the one public space where people do not feel a barrier,” she said, adding: “Some people may not access any other publicly funded cultural space. So, public libraries are brilliant spaces to bring those technologies in and let communities have access to them. Without this we’re getting a fragment of audience feedback on the use of new technologies.”

Why Virtual Reality?

One aspect of Digital Spaces is the VR tour. To some VR is a potentially world-changing technology, to others an interesting gimmick. For the former, it has been a harder nut to crack than expected in terms of widespread public use. Most recently Mark Zuckerburg and Meta have spent billions of dollars trying to harness it, with little success.

But the Digital Spaces programme should work either way because it’s not all about VR. Dave Lloyd says: “Virtual reality is very much about consumption,” explaining that using VR doesn’t require creative thinking. The audience doesn’t need to bring anything to the experience: “You come into the library, put a virtual reality headset on: here is the VR offer, these are the VR pieces, use them if you want to.”

Because it doesn’t ask much of the viewer, it can be hard to identify the takeaways or benefits for a community. “So, it’s potentially a very flat piece of process,” Dave says. “A library service should offer a bit more and when we first did Digital Spaces, I wrote that it needed to work on these levels: consume, create and library skills.”

But he says that with VR it is not an easy process to get beyond consumption: “It’s very tricky with technology that people haven’t experienced previously. If you ask someone ‘what do you want to do with this?’, unless they have experienced some of those things, the answer is ‘I don’t know’.”

Library skills

Fiona says that delivering a VR experience in a public library should generate value beyond entertainment: “For the libraries, what is really transformative, is the other stuff: the community of practice – getting those nine library services to work together.”

She believes the challenges that come with VR will demonstrate the value of cooperation. “It is really complicated and labour intensive for an individual library deciding to acquire VR headsets and license VR content for their communities. There are no comprehensive industry standards either for headsets or content management systems and individual experiences are generally optimised for one particular type of headset making them incompatible with others.”

Like books, VR content involves intellectual property, rights holders and agreements but “VR is like that, times 20,” she says, and, unlike library books “there is no centralised distribution agency for the content so you will have to go to each individual producer of each piece of work and ask them how much money they’d like, and then they’re going to ask you how many headsets, how many sessions and what duration – so it’s complicated.”

One to 10

The centralised creation of the VR tour fixes that side of the VR content problem, allowing libraries to explore the other challenges – like whether they can cope with a VR piece at all. Dave Lloyd grades VR content from one to 10 in terms of difficulty hosting.

He says most of the VR in Digital Spaces is level 3 or 4 and some pieces will be too much for public libraries like In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats (www.youtube.com/watch?v=LdaqhL5-8U4) a piece created for Coventry City of Culture. It cost £500k to make and lasts 40 minutes.

“You speak to the police who are chasing people. You travel in a car from location to location, experience the sound system, talk to the music producer, and then you’re in the rave with a lot of people dancing. The experience was incredible,” Dave says.

“But it’s 40 minutes long and you need to be able to move around and dance. In the time that four people could watch In Pursuit of Repetitive Beats, 60 or 70 could watch our content.”

The latest Digital Space programme will enable more: “In the first Digital Spaces we had bite-sized pieces. It didn’t require hand controls. Someone sat on a chair. This new Digital Spaces is different, it is far more interactive with hand controllers. So librarians will work through their library spaces and their health and safety, risk assessments.”

Tolerance

Another aspect is what people can cope with: “How long would you want to be in that immersive environment?” Fiona asks. “I think the headset closing you off completely will probably always be slightly limited to the gaming environment because you don’t really want to be shut off from your physical environment for too long.”

To explore this, Digital Spaces includes working with Neon8 a company that specialises in 180 degree (as opposed to 360 degree) VR. “It is much simpler. It’s also more akin to what we’re used to. In the theatre you don’t strain over your shoulder to see what’s going on behind you. It also makes what you need in terms of cameras and editing much simpler. So, we’re running community workshops in each of the nine libraries where the services will identify a community group they want to work with on a local story.”

Skills

Investigating this tolerance issue has provided useful feedback which Dave said was put to good use very quickly by library staff: “I’ve watched so many of my staff being able to engage with people who are slightly reticent, the people at the back, they’re thinking ‘it’s not really for me’.”

He said a big factor in turning by-standers into participants was showing them what other people had got out of it. “We made a lot of those stars you see in shops – 99p deals – in fluorescent colours, using words that people had used in our evaluation, so that when people came in, they could see the emotional connection that other people had. And that was very beneficial for getting people over the hurdle.”

So evaluation is vital but it has to be proportional. “After a 10 minute piece you can’t have a half hour evaluation… so we are fairly tick-box, but also with a ‘describe your emotions’ bit. We had a man in his early nineties who said something like: ‘I’ve had the most incredible experience. I woke up this morning and I didn’t realise I’d be climbing to the top of Mount Everest’.”

The importance of local

Another way to engage people in the technology is to ask them to make things, or commission things to be made. Alongside the workshops the project offers funding to create their own digital work. Fiona said: “Local is what shapes most of our lives, but every morning we wake up to Gaza, Ukraine and Trump. How do we make local resound as loudly as international?

"There’s an opportunity with this technology to make people feel very connected. So, these locally curated commissions are just as important as the VR touring collection. We’re talking to library services about which community would you like to make a piece of work with? Or which object in your collection? Leeds, for example, where they have a wonderful collection of Victorian botanicals that audiences don’t often get to interact with.”

She said a good commissioning approach was to say: “Don’t tell me about what technology you want to use, tell me the story you want to tell, who is it for, and why do you think they’re going to stop and give you the time to listen to it?”

Dave said libraries need to do more than just provide the finished technology: “If we ask ‘Do you want to create something on VR?’ everyone just says ‘yes’. But are we really gauging true community feedback if I say ‘here is an experience, do you want to do it more?’

He said the commissioning side of the first Digital Spaces project proved that when people work with their own stories they get over this hurdle and look at what the technology can do for them – with results including a sound piece from Bell Green which appeared on BBC Sounds and Radio 3, a jewellery making film from Foleshill library, and a local history piece in Tile Hill library.

Where next?

Technology affects all aspects of culture. Fiona says: “Take the opera composer Puccini who realised the potential of the new wax cylinder audio recording formats to sell his music to audiences around the world. These could only record around three minutes of music so he kept his show stopper arias to the length that would fit on one cylinder, changing the future of opera forever and ensuring his arias are still some of the most familiar pieces of classical music ever written.”

And she pointed to the rise of “boxset binge culture” as an example of how digital technology changed or disrupted audiences and industries. But despite this disruption, she says technology “will only ever be an adjunct to whatever we as human beings want to use it for.

Storytelling is still the most fundamental thing that human beings do with, for, and to one another. The rest of it is just a new set of crayons. The technology does not make the stories. It doesn’t make a story good and it can’t save a bad story from being a bad story.”

Dave points to an inspirational example at Coventry University, saying: “I was asked over for a cup of coffee and to watch a group of neurodiverse actors with motion capture suits on. They were doing a piece of theatre where the two actors were not allowed to touch, they couldn’t connect, but through the sensory equipped suits that they were wearing, their avatars could connect. So people unable to communicate in conventional society were given a way to try it. Could we put something like that in a public library?”