Higher education, and in particular libraries, have changed significantly over the last decade due to the adoption of technological advancements such as the Internet and the World Wide Web. The multitude of ways patrons can interact with librarians and library resources has been only the latest step in a very long process which started with traditional snail mail and the phone. As educators, librarians have always been interested in using new tools to improve services. These services are increasingly being made avail- able to patrons who do not physically enter a library building. This paper looks at what library services are currently being offered to students at a distance in order to better plan for the future.
Distance education has been of increasing importance to higher education and in particular library practitioners. While distance education was not a topic during my time as a student at Dominican University years ago, presently many library science programs around the country such as the Library Education Experimental Program (LEEP) at the University of
Advances in Library Administration and Organization
Advances in Library Administration and Organization, Volume 22, 23–77 Copyrightr2005 by Elsevier Ltd.
All rights of reproduction in any form reserved ISSN: 0732-0671/doi:10.1016/S0732-0671(05)22002-3
23
Illinois in Urbana-Champaign are offering courses or entire degrees via a distance. Furthermore, the library science courses I presently teach at Cen- tral Missouri State University are either entirely online or hybrids with very few face-to-face class meetings.
Distance education is, however, part of a larger universe, and can be viewed as a sub-field of instructional technology. As defined bySeels and Richey (1994, p. 1) ‘‘Instructional Technology is the theory and practice of design, development, utilization, management and evaluation of proc- esses and resources for learning.’’ This definition from The Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) ties together the educational and teaching aspect of academia in which libraries are an im- portant part. As stated byBateman (2003):
Of particular interest to academic librarians is the field of educational technology. As educators themselves, they have been using technology for quite some time to educate faculty, staff, and students in information literacy. College and university librarians have also expanded their roles and have enhanced the faculty – librarian relationship by providing faculty support in the use of educational technology (p. 9).
Academic libraries tend to differ from other types of libraries in their ap- proach to serving patrons in that they endeavor to teach students, faculty, and staff how to find information instead of simply providing it for them. By teaching students to be self-sufficient library users, students will be able to become lifelong learners and can function independently in libraries and in life in general. Cognizant of learning theories and the needs of the parent institution, a constructivist approach to serving academic library patrons is an example of the connection between library instruction and classroom instruction. As such, in the college or university environment, patrons of libraries are heavy users of technology.
Distance education involves students, faculty, and staff in a myriad of roles. A widely recognized definition is offered by Moore and Kearsley (1996):
Distance education is planned learning that normally occurs in a different place from teaching and as a result requires special techniques of course design, special instructional techniques, special methods of communication by electronic and other technology, as well as special organizational and administrative arrangements (p. 2).
A slightly newer definition is offered bySimonson, Smaldino, Albright, and Zvacek (2000): ‘‘Distance education is now often defined as institution- based, formal education where the learning group is separated geograph- ically, and where interactive telecommunications systems are used to connect learners, resources, and instructors’’ (p. 7).
The student in a distance education course naturally requires library services via a distance. The exact amount or the types of services these students require will vary depending on the institution, program, and indivi- dual class. To aid in understanding these requirements, the Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) (2000) states:
Library resources and services in institutions of higher education must meet the needs of all their faculty, students, and academic support staff, wherever these individuals are located, whether on a main campus, off campus, in distance education or extended campus programs, or in the absence of a campus at all; in courses taken for credit or non-credit; in continuing education programs; in courses attended in person or by means of electronic transmission; or any other means of distance education (p. 1023).
ACRL also specifically states that ‘‘Distance learning library services refers to those library services in support of college, university, or other post- secondary courses and programs offered away from a main campus, or in the absence of a traditional campus, and regardless of where credit is given’’
(Association of College & Research Libraries, 2000, p. 1023). What those services must consist of will vary from institution to institution. Accrediting agencies, regional and program-specific, as well as other interested parties may encourage certain services, but there are no specific guidelines that detail a set list of minimum requirements. However, in general, the Asso- ciation of College & Research Libraries (2000) suggests that this include reference assistance, user instruction, interlibrary loan, document delivery, access to reserve materials, adequate service hours, and more.
Distance education may be considered by some as a relatively new de- velopment, but in reality it has been around for quite some time. Many of the same services have already been offered in different formats. For in- stance, remote access to online catalogs is not a new concept. Book catalogs, the forerunners of card catalogs, were an early form of remote access. In the 19th century, a student living miles from the university could find out what the library owned by consulting the book catalog kept in his or her rooming house or study (Kalin, 1991).
Correspondence schools have been around since the 1880s, long before the computer and the Internet (Moore & Kearsley, 1996). Students received most of their materials though the mail. Since many of these students needed library services to complete assignments, librarians often supported these students by compiling printed bibliographies or research guides as well as providing copies of required readings and interlibrary loan services (Cooper, Dempsey, & Vanaja, 1998).
These services grew over time as institutions increased their offerings and required more of their students. Packages mailed to students began to
include lecture notes, copies of reading materials, assignments, and other printed resources. Often the students would need to physically access a library, which led to making arrangements between libraries.
Because print resources dominated the library scene, the initial efforts of librarians to meet the needs of students focused on three areas (Derlin &
Erazo, 1997, p. 103): ‘‘(1) access to printed material and a limited selection of other media such as records and films, (2) assistance in the search for appropriate printed material related to specific topics of interest, and (3) retrieval of printed material for the learner’s use.’’ As the traditional library was then still a physical repository of printed material, the library was challenged in performing these functions, being place- and time-bound.
All of this changed with the birth of the Internet in 1969 (Leiner, Cerf, Clark, & Kahn, 2000). The first applications that were developed were tex- tual in their nature due to the limited bandwidth. The first library uses were for tools such as e-mail, gophers, and listservs.
Educators looking for new ways of reaching students looked toward the fledgling Internet. Bibliographic instruction using the Internet appeared in the early 1990s. Fairmont State College began using e-mail to teach biblio- graphic instruction sessions in 1994 (Burke, 1996), and the University of Illinois Libraries experimented in such offerings at around the same time (Vishwanatham, Wilkins, & Jevec, 1997).
Interaction with students began to change when the web was developed.
Today, the library’s web site is often viewed as the library in and of itself (Linden, 2000), and it is the student’s point of contact from home. However, students from home see these web sites from a slightly different perspective.
These students require instruction on what services are provided to them, how to access them, and in which ways personal assistance can be provided.
They do not need a building map, but need, instead, to know, how to process interlibrary loan requests.
An interesting note is that all of these changes are actually increasing the need for librarians in order to design these web sites, organize the infor- mation, subscribe to indexes, and teach users how to access resources (Laverty, 1997). With more databases, students see an entire world of ci- tations, and they tend to want everything. So the demand for interlibrary loans is actually increasing.
The task we now confront is determining which services are most impor- tant to students and where improvements can be made (Cooper et al., 1998).
This is an area in which a discrepancy sometimes exists between the per- ceptions of patrons and those of library and administrative personnel. While much has been written about what services should be offered, little empirical
data exists which shows what specifically is being offered, what should be offered, and what students want.
Library instruction is but one of a set of services that distance education must continue to review and improve upon. In the early days of libraries, the situation was quite different. It was not until the 1960s and 1970s that librarians began supplementing one-on-one teaching from the reference desk with classroom instruction (Engle, 1996). As an early adopter of web use, Engle used NCSA Mosaic on his Macintosh and created web pages that were distributed throughout his local network to multiple users simultane- ously, one of the first examples of distance learning via the web.
This has led to present-day use of video conferencing (Balas, 2001) and streaming video (Crowther & Wallace, 2001) to interact with distance ed- ucation students.Caspers (1998)experimented with interactive television as well as one-on-one reference via phone and/or e-mail, and she now uses web tutorials. This is leading towards new ways of reaching distance students, in some instances using full-scale course management software such as WebCT or BlackBoard to further enhance communication between librarians and students (Kesselman, Khanna, & Vazquez, 2000).