Here at Ignacio Community Library, we’ve started hosting Virtual Reality Travel programs and we are thrilled with the engagement from our patrons and other community members! Our first event was VR Travel: Italy and we made pasta from scratch as an activity, ate an Italian dinner together, and traveled to Italy by means of our Meta Quest Pro VR Headsets and the program Wander. The patron feedback was overwhelmingly positive!
For the following month, we decided to visit India for our VR travel program and the response was even bigger! We ended up with five wonderful patron volunteers who were either from India, had traveled there extensively, or whose families were from there. When we did our India program, we were so grateful for our patron volunteers who made and brought authentic Indian dishes to share. One of the patron volunteers brought saris for everyone to learn to tie, that same volunteer set up a “guess what it is” table of interesting Indian items, and the anecdotes and stories our volunteers shared with participants made the whole program more layered and fascinating! We learned that when we host a virtual travel program with the involvement of engaged patrons, the program is so much richer, more interesting, more engaging, and also better attended!
So far, we have tentative plans with patron volunteers to do Slovakia, Mexico, and Czechia in 2025. We will most likely repeat our India program next year, since India was so popular, we even had a waiting list to participate in September. We may also repeat Italy and Egypt, especially if we find we have patron volunteers who have stories and information to share about those countries.
Depending on interest, we may eventually open this virtual travel idea up to include places within the United States, particularly if they are unique or interesting; but, for now we are sticking to foreign locales.
Our Virtual Travel team is meeting over the next two months to flesh out the VR Travel Program schedule for early 2025. If you or someone you know in the community is from an interesting place anywhere in the world, and you are willing to share and participate in this type of a program, please reach out and let us know! You can call the library at 970-563-9287, send an email to Liz at lvontauffkirchen@ignaciolibrary.org, call Liz’s desk directly at 970-442-6240, or stop in and tell us in person. We would love to feature your favorite world destination while we continue to learn more about other places and cultures!