Abstract
This article examines the public services component of digital and virtual libraries, focusing on the end-user experience. As the number and types of ‘places’ where library users access library collections and services continue to expand (now including cell phones, iPods, and three-dimensional virtual reality environments populated by avatars), librarians and educators need to examine the key components of these experiential environments, then establish and deploy service programs and underlying policies and procedures that exploit the affordances offered by these new usage environments. Several of the characteristics of these new service environments (e.g. the competition – or conflation – between learning and entertainment, the competition between various libraries and information services in the same space, the read–write participatory nature of many of these environments, and the arrival in a big way of multimedia – both concurrent and serial) are explored.