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Introductory comments by Ms. Elizabeth F. Watson and Dr. (Mrs.) Neela Jagannathan for the second "Virtual conference": Library/Information Systems and Student Support:    (10 - 30 November 1998)

10 November 1998

Hello and welcome from Neela and myself.  We are very pleased to welcome you to this Virtual Conference (VC) on library and information services to support distance learning.  The excellent Virtual Conference on Distance education and Challenged Communities, which was moderated by Professor Raj Dhanarajan, President and CEO of COL, provided a terrific start to the series of 4 VCs which lead up to COLs 10th anniversary Forum on Open Learning which will be held in Brunei in March 1999.   For those of you who are not familiar with this activity we invite you to visit COLs web site at http://www.col.org/forum.  There you will find information on this important meeting in Brunei.

2.  During the next three weeks we would like to touch on a number of issues that will interest all of us.  In order to maximise our discussions we propose to spend the time in the following manner.  Each week we will post a "teaser" (leader) on the "flavour of the week" (topics) to encourage and stimulate discussion and comments on specific issues.  This approach is designed to cover a number of issues that we see as being important.  This is not to say that comments on other issues will not be appreciated or encouraged at anytime during this VC.  We warmly invite you to make any suggestions/comments that you have on any aspect of library and information services to distance learners. Please share your thoughts and views with us.  This is what VCs are all about.  Our aim is simply to provide a setting for the many important areas that need to be covered by the introduction of issues and topics in a timely and manageable fashion. Following is the "menu" for conference:

3.  WEEK 1: Introduction and overview to DL; Distance librarians and relationships with the other DE stakeholders; and, Management issues and patterns.
WEEK 2: Services - what is needed; how do you provide them; new strategies and new developments including custodial vs. facilitating role.  Internationalization of DL
WEEK 3: Research in DL - what is needed and what are you doing?
Continuing education - CE for DL. Copyright, WIPO (World Intellectual Property Organisation) and the Y2K and Y2006K requirements (dates by which countries must enact legislation that meets the basic requirements of the WIPO agreement which they have signed).

INTRODUCTION AND OVERVIEW TO DISTANCE LIBRARIANSHIP

4.  Before we begin the discussion it might be useful to remind ourselves who our clients are and what makes them different from other library users.  Distance learners are students who are pursuing a programme or course of study for either a terminal qualification, a specific continuing education need or a personal desire to enrich their understanding of a particular topic.  There are a variety of reasons why people opt to pursue their educational goals at a distance.  Reasons include cost, family or job responsibilities and more recently distance is the only way that a particular course is being delivered.  Using Barbados where Elizabeth lives as an example of the spread of distance education she finds that the weekend papers in Barbados often have a number of ads for distance programmes in a variety of disciplines from a number of DEs around the world.  Increasingly DE is about improving, increasing and expanding the market share of an educational institution and no country is beyond the reach of DE providers.  The question she always ask herself is how are these students going to access the information they need to support their educational goals? Sadly, she seldom gets an answer at all.   We are sure that the Barbados experience is not unique.  What is are the experiences of DE students in your country?  The traditional distance learner was often a rural dweller, female, and middle aged.   Often such students saw this modality of education as being "a second bite at the educational cherry".  Today's distance learner is very different indeed. Every discipline is taught at a distance, males and females are distance learners, distance students live anywhere and everywhere, sometimes a distance student is registered with more than one distance teaching institution at the same time, distance students are the young, the not so young and the no longer young. Distance students are a diverse group.  They are found in every socio-economic, cultural, linguistic, gender, age and religious group. This is what makes them such a diverse but extremely fascinating clientele. This diversity however challenges us in ways that are completely new to those that have faced the profession in the past?  What is your response to these challenges?  Have they been successful? Or, have you had to adopt alternate strategies?

5.  Traditionally students are expected to go to a library, which is located on a campus, to satisfy their information needs.  Distance learners who are separated by time and place from their educational institution do not have that luxury.  Therefore the library has to find ways and means to take the library and information services to them.  This is a very new paradigm for librarians.  Sending information to students is but one aspect of distance library services, this is perhaps nothing more than an extension of an interlibrary loan service, instead of sending the material to a library, the information is sent directly to the user.  However there is much more to librarianship than that.  For us, living and practicing in countries that do not have as advanced technology as others and staring into the face of the 21st. century one of the KEY issues is information literacy.

• How can we enable, empower and extend the information literacy skills of the distance learners who reside in the type of environments that are mentioned above?
• What are the key issues that you face in your environment?

We are patently aware of many of the exciting developments that are taking place elsewhere through the application of Information Technology (IT).  However that reality is not ours or indeed many distance learners.  IT is not cheap or easily accessible for many distance learners and therefore we have to think of accompanying strategies that we can use to deliver information services until all distance learners have the means - financial, infra-structural and technological to became a members of the IT family. Thus during this VC it would be really useful to hear of all strategies that are used to deliver information.

DISTANCE LIBRARIANS AND RELATIONSHIPS WITH OTHER DE STAKEHOLDERS

6. Not all of us are as fortunate as Neela who works in an institution that only offers distance programmes. Her situation however has its own challenges which she will share. Many of us on the other hand have gotten into distance librarianship through the "back door" that is to say it was not a determined choice nor was it a professional goal. We either saw a need which we responded to or it just "happened" because of an institutional decision to offer distance education. Many of these decisions took place without any reference to either the library or librarians and therefore even now many of us are being forced to play catch-up.  This VC provides a unique opportunity for us to get to know each other as well as to share experiences so that we can provide the best services that we can for our clients.

7.  Many of us we face many of the same challenges that our clients face: isolation; how to establish a DL service; how to maintain and expand a DL services; what services are reasonable to provide and what services are not; and how to tool ourselves to provide the best services that we can to our clients.  One of the aims of this VC is to share knowledge and experiences as well as to provide the beginning of a support group for those of us who work in DL.  While we are at different positions on the service spectrum, without doubt we all have a common aim which as Beagle states is to have "a greater library role in distance learning in general and for involving library administrators in distance learning facility planning in particular".  http://www.westga.edu:80/library/jlsde/vol1/2/DBeagle.html.   This quotation is a truism whether you are associated with a mega DE institution such as the Indira Gandhi  National Open University to which Neela is attached or a modest sized university spread over 4 campuses, each on a different island and serving 14 self-governing islands which are linked by a historical past but separated by water such as The University of the West Indies where I work. Beagle's statement forces us to do some reflection on where we are in the distance learning facility. Some questions that come to mind are:

• What do we have to do to become a major partner in the distance education system?
• What have you done at your institution that has placed distance library services in a key position in your distance education system?
• Have you had anything that has not worked? And what could/should have been to done to change the result?

We are sure that others occur to you, what are they and what solutions would you suggest? Library services for off-campus and distance education: the second annotated bibliography Alexander (Sandy) Slade and Marie Kascus (Englewood CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1996) lists a number of citations on the role of libraries in distance education and open learning.  While these publications are important and necessary an issue that occurs to us is - has anyone written anything on how librarians can improve their positioning with other DE stakeholders?  That to us is a key issue for some of our colleagues.

MANAGEMENT ISSUES AND PATTERNS OF DISTANCE LIBRARY SERVICES

8. These questions bring us to the management policies on which guide a distance library service.  These include factors such as institutional philosophy and polices, funding, resources and linkages with other institutions. Because every institution has developed its own approach to these fundamental issues there is no one answer.  Some institutions that have distance students do not have a management policy for their library and information services while others have very sophisticated management instruments. Rather than going into specific details on this aspect of DL we see management issues and patterns as a topic on which freely flowing comments and  exchanges of experiences would be useful. The following might be helpful "starters".

• What is the policy of your institution with regard to managing its distance library services?
• For those institutions that do not have a policy what challenges have you encountered and what strategies have you used to address them?

9.  A recent publication of the American College and Research Librarians Division of the American Library Association is the revised version of the ACRL Guidelines for distance learning library services. This was approved in July of 1998.   The guidelines are available at http://www.ala.org/acrl/guides/distlrng.html.   These guidelines are a useful reference tool even for those who do not have management instruments.

10.  Some interesting management concerns and patterns are given in a Library services to distance learners in the Commonwealth: a reader.   Elizabeth F. Watson and Neela Jagannathan, eds. (Vancouver: Commonwealth of learning, 1996.) This reader of 22 articles on distance library services from around the Commonwealth provides some very useful and interesting insights.

11. The foregoing comments are merely teasers to stimulate discussion and the exchange of ideas. We do not see ourselves as "delivering papers" at this VC, instead we see ourselves as facilitators, encouraging everyone who has joined this VC to make a contribution every comment is important to us and will make a difference to the development of this specialization within our noble and esteemed profession.

12.  All replies and comments will automatically be distributed to all those who have registered for this VC.  Please see http://www.col.org/forum/virtual.htm for information on all of the virtual conference and how to sign up for each one.

13.  At the end of the VC we will translate our discussions and thoughts into report form and this will be laid as your contribution to the Brunei meeting in March 1999. For those of you who do not have your full name and address at the bottom of your email message, please include it as we will make, as an appendix, a list of all the participants of  this VC. Once again we thank you for joining us and we look forward to a very stimulating and enjoyable 21 days.

Best wishes,   Elizabeth and Neela

Ms. Elizabeth F. Watson, Librarian, Learning Resource Centre, The University of the West Indies, Barbados

Dr. (Mrs.) Neela Jagannathan, University Librarian and Information Officer, Library and Documentation Division, Indira Gandhi National Open University, India

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