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In the last years, the world of didactics, especially in university and continuing education fields, has seen an amplification of its own resources and methods.
The development of more and more effective and customizable technologies, the changes in workplace habits and time, the increasing requests for updating and qualified staff have promoted methodologies, such as e-learning, that effectively answer the need for high-quality training and information, and are easy to use and permanently available.
In this process of constant development, e-learning has been using technologies and resources (virtual reality and/or serious games) that were not created at first for didactic purposes. Originally created for a recreational use, virtual environments can enhance today theoretical contents.
The e-Mergency project, set up for this scope, was thought up to show the efficiency of matching virtual reality models with traditional e-learning ones, allowing evaluation through on line classes called "e-Mergency: Training on-line in Emergency Planning for Libraries and Archives".
The idea was born out of a meeting between two persons, both willing to educate a large number of archivists and librarians in emergency planning for the preservation of our cultural heritage: Maria Barbara Bertini, Director of the State Archives of Milan and Simona Budassi, restorer of library materials and Doctor in "e-learning - Development and Delivery".
In spite of the law conditions and the - slow - development of small projects aimed to raise awareness to the risk issue, the situation of staff training in Italy is not so rosy. A research questionnaire carried out among several libraries involved in the eMergency project underlined a gap in training. This gap may concern many other national institutions as it shows a generalized lack in emergency planning even in important structures.
An analysis of the online training supply in emergency planning showed that today a user can only access to self-study trainings which are not so different from any methods of updating with traditional materials. Other types of content delivery, such as virtual classrooms, are more difficult to organize because of the necessity to match the temporal and organizational needs of individual users, which requires a constant synchronization. The difficulty to capitalize on the theoretical contents and to translate them into action, in the form of practical works and tests,...