Losh’s “Reading Room(s)” surveys the physical and digital spaces of three national libraries – the Library of Congress, the British Library and the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF) – and their divergent approaches to the user experience of accessing archival materials in both modalities. Her deconstruction of the libraries’ physical structures emphasizes the degree to which architecture functions to embody political and cultural ideologies, and to control user interactions in the space; that is, “a document archive as a physical space is constituted by prohibitions on reading” (374). She cites the example of the Mitterand Library in the BNF, which physically reinforces hierarchies of privilege by limiting access to one of its two libraries to established scholars only. In particular, she highlights the widely-practiced institutional surveillance of patrons as a condition of using archival materials; it is an important reminder that providing access to archives is not the same as making users feel welcome. By contrast, Losh maintains, the online presence of the libraries affords users anonymity and free entry, and subtly communicates liberal values like open access – though not without contradictions, in terms of the hidden decision-making processes about what to make available.

I include Losh’s article in the bibliography to support a rationale for using virtual reality as an archival interface, but also as a caution that a virtual environment modeled on the physical one may enact some of the same phenomenological barriers. She opens her argument with a pivotal observation: “Just as the physical building in which a national library is housed can serve as a tangible expression of political and cultural philosophy, the architecture of a given digital archive represents and manifests particular ideological features in keeping with the specific national legacy that is preserved and disseminated electronically” (373). Though Losh’s argument focuses specifically on digitization policies, it can conceivably be extended to encompass the design of the diegetic space within a virtual reality archival interface.

What consequences, then, might there be for the design of archival virtual reality environments? Does a skeuomorphic approach risk revivifying the politico-aesthetic ideologies of their physical counterparts? How can residual markers of colonial power and oppression embedded in the virtual architecture of the space evoke unpleasant emotions for different Indigenous researchers, for example? In identifying future directions for the ‘Archival Interfaces in VR,’ a more robust theorization of affective experience in institutional spaces is an urgently needed avenue for further development;[1] we may look to museum studies to bolster the existing archival literature on the topic.

[1] This assumes, of course, that the design of the virtual reality environment attempts to emulate an institutional space. There are innumerable other possibilities; see “Imagining Transformative Spaces: The Personal–Political Sites of Community Archives” by Caswell et al. (just below) for another approach.