The State Library of Queensland is to launch a virtual tour application in response to growing demand from school students and educators for a deeper learning experience.
According to State Library of Queensland documents school visits to the library have grown steadily since a major redevelopment of the library in 2006. In 2010 some 3730 school students and 279 educators took tours of the building.
“Demand from educators for a deeper learning experience and continued engagement with the Library has continued to increase and greatly exceeds existing resources,” the documents read.
“This project will enable the Library to allow educators, students and users to engage with the building and its collections in a fun, self directed way.”
The application will target children, school groups, families, public libraries and community groups and will be accessible on Apple’s iPhone and iPad as well as Android-based devices.
“The product created by this project will be used to assist school groups and clients to engage with the physical space and collections through play in a self directed discovery of the library building,” the documents read.
“It is also expected that the [application] will enable continuous creation of different activities and have the ability to have new collections, updated content and be refreshed over time.”
In May the National Library of Australia announced it had released version 4.0 of its Trove search engine which is capable of crawling millions of journal articles.
Mid last year the State Library of New South Wales moved to the next stage of its three-year project to create electronic records for collection material only accessible through paper based indexes and finding aids.
The stage involved creating machine-readable cataloguing- (MARC) enabled eRecords for a batch of 64,000 monographs held in its Mitchell Library Printed Books collection.
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