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Visualizing History: Tunnels of Vauquois is an educational immersive virtual reality (VR) exhibit that makes the invisible history of World War I soldiers' experiences in the tunnels of Vauquois, France, visible to contemporary audiences. The exhibit presents the visitor with both discrete knowledge and the opportunity for emotional awareness. The virtual environment is recreated from scanned data of the original site. Visitors traverse the tunnel through the use of a head-mounted display, redirected walking, passive haptics, aligned physical and virtual environments, interactive tracked props, and narration. In this article, we describe the motivation and rationale for creating an immersive exhibit for informal learning environments, such as museums, libraries, and school VR laboratories. We also describe how the current exhibit functions and our iterative design process informed by observational feedback from pilot testing.

Library exhibition practices vary significantly between institutions, depending on expertise, resources and goals of the individual library. The University Libraries at Virginia Tech have supported and developed two exhibition programmes within the past 6 years, both with a focus on showcasing products and processes from classes around campus rather than library materials and artefacts. While such work is unique, it can provide valuable experiences both for the contributors and for the creators of these exhibitions, as well as those who see and interact with them. In this article, we discuss the history and origins of these programmes, the Course Exhibit Initiative and the Active Learning Curation Program, how they work and the outcomes they strive to achieve. We discuss the workflows that we take to showcase the work of our contributors and demonstrate how these programmes share some outcomes with exhibit programmes based in special collections but have their own unique challenges and opportunities. Finally, we make the case that the output of these two exhibit programmes provides a new experience of serendipity in libraries.