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Webcast Series

Transcript of Essential Library Services Webcast

SUSAN: Well, welcome to the series. I’d like to introduce Pat Shea of the Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications who will moderate our show today.

PAT: Well, thank you, Susan. And hello, and welcome to the WCET Webcast Series providing student services to distance learners. This is Pat Shea. I’m coming to you today from our east coast office in Summit, New Jersey and Susan is here from Boulder, Colorado.

Today, in partnership with HorizonLive, we are kicking off our Webcast Series with a presentation, Essential Library Services for the Distance Learner, with Elizabeth Dupuis from the University of Texas at Austin. This new series will feature one webcast each month with a focus on a different student service each month.

I know we have many WCET members attending today but there are some folks who are not members and I thought it would be a good idea just to take a couple of minutes to tell you a little bit about WCET, which focuses on advancing the effective use of technology in higher education, and invite you to visit our web site and become involved with us.

WCET is a cooperative of higher education institutions, agencies, non-profit organizations and corporations involved in distance learning. Currently we have more than two hundred and fifty members in seven countries, but most are spread across the US. We undertake many projects in the interest of our members. Some of our current ones have resulted in free web resources on technology costing; online student support services, like this webcast series; quality assurance and other online learning topics. We also offer conferences and professional development institutes, such as the Managing and Developing E-Learning Institute and the Asia-Pacific Distributed Learning Forum.

This year’s annual conference, e-Revolution at EDU, will be held in Coeur d’Alene, Idaho, October 31st through November 3rd. So, please, if you’re not a WCET member, visit our site and learn a little bit more about us.

And now for our presentation on Library Services. It is my great pleasure to introduce you to Elizabeth Dupuis. She is the head of the Digital Information Literacy Office at the University of Texas at Austin. Besides directing the instructional initiatives for the general libraries in the university, Elizabeth is the Project Manager and Instructional Designer of TILT, a web-based educational site introducing first year students to academic research. Over the past five years, she has served on numerous state and national professional committees. Her recent publications and presentations have covered topics such as Successful Partnerships for Online Projects, Designing Interactive Online Environments and How Technology is Shaping Academic Libraries. Elizabeth, welcome.

BETH: Thank you so much. I am pleased to be here today talking. I would like to thank The Western Cooperative for Educational Telecommunications for inviting me to speak to you, and also to HorizonLive for being wonderful about hosting us and having done so many amazing things already to get us all here together.

I looked very briefly at the representation of who was here and it seems like a really great mixture of people from across the country and internationally. And I hope to provide some times for us to communicate with each other; at least, to have you have a chance to give me some feedback and some input to some questions, rather than me just talking to you. And, yes, that’s my picture in the corner. I don’t look like that today.

We’ll be using chat the whole time. You’re welcome to ask any questions along the way that you have. I’ll be able to see that while I’m talking to you. Also, we have Susan online, who’s going to be keeping track of all of your questions that I may not notice as I’m trying to continue with my thoughts. So we’ll be taking some breaks along the way, and she’ll be getting an idea of what kinds of questions you have and then feeding those to me over the phone — so you’ll hear us talking and you may hear your question presented that way.

The first question — and some of you have already seen the “yes” and “no” buttons above the picture in the right hand corner — the first question I have for you today is have you already done a HorizonLive lecture before as a participant? And you can go ahead and choose either yes or no. And that will give me some idea of how comfortable everybody is with this particular software and have a sense of what kinds of things I need to explain or not. So I’ll give you a chance to answer that.

Throughout this whole presentation I’m going to be posing all sorts of polls and questions and give you a chance to participate. Also it’ll have some text information. So you’ll have chances along the way at different stages to ask questions and to give some feedback.

Let me tell you a little bit more about who I am and what my background is and what I’ll be talking to you about today, as we discussed, The Essential Library Services for the Distance Learner. My name is Elizabeth Dupuis and, as Pat mentioned, I’m head of something called the Digital Information Literacy Office which is here at the University of Texas at Austin. And, from that office we actually coordinate all the instructional services for the University of Texas campus, all types of audiences and topics and media.

I’ve held this position for about six years and, although I don’t coordinate all of the distance education library instruction programs, I have been involved with that for a while on our campus and will be talking to you from, primarily, my experience as an instruction librarian and the kinds of services that we need to provide to all sorts of learners. Also, as Pat mentioned, I have been the Project Manager and Instructional Designer of a web-based tutorial and so, as you have questions — if you do — towards the end I’d be happy to answer any questions about developing that kind of information and online library instruction and library service for students.

I also have my email address up here. So, if you have any questions after the talk, now or in the next couple of weeks, you’re welcome to ask me for more information. I notice someone asked about these slides being available and I’ll certainly work with that at HorizonLive to see if we can find a good place to put this, either on the HorizonLive site for a while or on the WCET site, or somewhere else. And so you can get back and we’ll tell you some more about that, probably by the time this talk is over.

SUSAN: We will have them, Beth, on the WCET site.

BETH: Oh. That’s great. Well there’s your answer already. That’s perfect.

The next thing I’d like is to find out a little bit of information about who you are, as the participants, and why you’re interested in this topic. And to give you a chance I’m going to go ahead and ask you a question here and find out what was it about the topic — in one minute or less if you can answer, phrases are okay — what attracted you to this presentation and/or what do you hope to get from this talk? I don’t yet know what your backgrounds are, how many people here are librarians or from information science fields, and how many people coordinate distance education programs, in general; and give me a little bit of an idea on what your goals are and then I can tell you a little bit more about what the overview of the talk is that we will be discussing today. So I’ll give you a chance to answer that — somewhat briefly — and then we’ll go through and publish the results so everybody can see a little bit more about where you’re from and what you’re interested in.

MATT: And Beth, I’ll just say it again, I’ll publish the results for you.

BETH: Oh that’s fabulous. Thank you.

MATT: You’re welcome.

BETH: I’ll tell you a little bit more while we’re waiting for your answers. The University of Texas at Austin is one institution of the University of Texas system schools. There’s sixteen component institutions. And the University of Texas system has its own distance education campus called the TeleCampus, and to that they also have their own coordinated library services department for distance education. What I’ll be talking about a little more today is from my perspective of offering it from one campus: the University of Texas at Austin Campus, and some of the types of services in general that you could provide. But I imagine there’ll be a time, through the chat board, if you have experience related to these kinds of things or other information to add, please do post comments as I’m talking, things in support or things from your own background so that people can learn, not just from myself, but also you can all learn from each other.

Okay. So, hopefully, many of you have had a chance to say a little bit about why you’re here and we can go ahead and publish those results soon.

MATT: I’ll have them in about ten seconds.

BETH: Okay. Oh good. I’m glad to see people are posting to the chat board, as well. While we’re waiting...

MATT: Okay, here you go.

BETH: Okay. Okay good. So we can get some idea, as you’re going to the next line, to see who some of the people who are here and what some of their backgrounds are. I see some instructional designers and distance education coordinators and library service and coordinators. So we’ll see if we can touch on something for everybody here. Because of the diversity of your backgrounds, it might be that, the question and answer times, it can be a really good time to tailor some of this content to your perspective. And I’ll try and answer those questions as best I can.

The next part that I wanted to tell you is a little bit about what Pat and I discussed as the objectives for this presentation and what kinds of things we’d like to cover. And I hope, based on some of the information that you’ve seen from what people are interested in, you’ll get an idea of some of the objectives that we have, and these are the four.

I thought first we’d talk a little bit why libraries are needed in all types of educational environments, libraries and library services. I think it’s easy to overlook the role of a library in an online environment because people tend to think of libraries in a more traditional sense, so there’ll be a little bit about that.

Next then we’ll discuss a list of library services that I would consider essential for distance learners. Many of these things relate to traditional library services in a new environment. But, often, it’s the kind of thing where that type of service may not be a direct translation from the traditional. Just because the users are not as nearby and maybe you can’t see them — like I can’t see you today to see if you’re nodding or frowning or smiling. It’s easier to not map those services and see what needs to be adjusted or changed to provide quality service to a distance learner.

The third objective is to give you just a couple examples in each case in those library services as some institutions that have created model projects. And when I say model I don’t necessarily mean the best, but I mean a good example.

And last, I want to include a time for discussion and questions. And so we’ll be doing that throughout, as I mentioned, and I’d like to save, probably, about the last five to ten minutes for questions of a broader nature at the end, as well.

So far, do we have from you any questions — besides technical questions about audio and so on — are there any questions about these objectives, or some clarification that anybody needs? I’ll give you a couple of seconds to put anything in the chat box if there is.

Okay, good. So collaboration issues is one of the topics that we’ll try and touch on, as well, towards the end.

Let me go ahead and continue now into the heart of what we’re talking about — so we don’t get too late here. And the first part that I wanted to mention and really stress, whether you are coming from a library at an institution or from a distance education program coordinator role, or even just a faculty member’s role who plays a part in these programs, I think it’s really important to understand the nature of libraries. And for me, libraries have a very strong educational mission, whether it’s an academic library, which is pretty obvious, or a school library; but also public libraries and special libraries and even institutions that have just a couple of people in a library and they provide corporate training of some sort.

In all of those instances, the people who work in the libraries and the library itself plays a very strong role in not just providing content, but also providing some broader skills and some of the training and how to evaluate and intake the information and some of the bigger picture things about life-long learning. The traditional sense, I think, of libraries is that people have focused on them as a place, maybe that manages content and that keeps books, sort of a historical warehouse of content. And a lot of people who are not in the library field think just as a library catalogue and the resources that they’re used to seeing in a building, or a place for people to study.

And I think now, that whole idea, the nature of what a library is, is changing for people in the library profession; I think others are starting to see it as well. And there are a lot of other roles that libraries play. And one of the things is the idea of information access and management is not just the idea of having access to checking out a book, but where you can get that book from remotely and how you can manipulate different kinds of information, and create new content and evaluate that content. And so, in that instance, it’s not just managing who can take out a book and where that book sits, but a lot of other more complicated issues relating to how information is packaged and used and manipulated.

Another one of the roles that libraries play, especially academic libraries, is to be support for the curriculum and curricular issues for the faculty and even for students’ personal interests. And that’s one thing I think that gets overlooked with distance education students very often is that they have that same scope of interest — it’s not just what’s covered in the course and not just the textbook — but they still need resources and supplementary materials that will let them expand some of their knowledge and let them explore areas that maybe aren’t directly covered.

So the idea of creating resources available for particular assignments and helping faculty work on assignments that can be completed in an online environment effectively — those are all the types of things that libraries can do as well.

One of the biggest issues, I think, or one of the most prominent lately, is information literacy and the idea that libraries are not just teaching how to use a particular index or a library catalogue or how to find a book, but some bigger picture skills about how to think critically about the information that people find, and how to look at different types of media and how to make judgments about different sources and ideas, and learning to develop a more critical sense. And all that plays a role in information literacy.

I think one of the things that’s sort of difficult, in a distance education program, is seeing how to make there be a progression of these skills and how to let students practice these skills and still cover the content when you’re working in an environment where students aren’t all together and you can’t see their progress of their work. Even still, it’s all very possible to create a progression of skills. It just is going to require a lot of coordination. And this would be between the distance education program coordinators and the faculty and the librarians and the students, or learners, themselves. The information literacy idea is particularly important and one of the main things I’ll be stressing towards the end.

The last issue that I want to cover and the reason that I think libraries are also very important — and this is a good leverage point and maybe talking point if you are in a library environment and trying to convince others about the necessity of library services — and that’s the idea of life-long learning. And, for me, one of the roles of higher education is to instill in people sort of that sense of curiosity and the love for learning, and an ability to learn how to learn and to continue to keep up their skills once they’re done with the program. And whether a student completes that program in a traditional campus environment or in an environment that’s just a distance education program where they finish it all online, they still should gain, I think, that same sense of what it is to be a professional in that discipline and how to maintain their skills and be adaptable and all those same things can be acquired in similar ways. Maybe different techniques but all those same skills can be acquired. And life-long learning, I think, is a particularly important issue to cover.

The next slide that I have is a quote from the guidelines — the ACRL guidelines — for distance learning library services. And I’ll give you a second to read through it. There are two main ideas that I think are important concepts here.

The main concepts, after you have a chance to skim it, the first is that these types of services should be available to everyone in the university community. They mention the faculty, students and academic support staff. And I think that's really essential, the idea that we'll be creating, through these library services, when we think of students, that's particularly important.

But also the faculty that participate could be considered a distance learner in some ways, and the other staff that need to assist those people on the online environment also need to have certain kinds of support and training.

The second issue that's really valuable here I think to talk about is the location and these types of services and resources should be available wherever these individuals are located. And they go on to list all sorts of possibilities.

I think those are the two main ideas to get across when we discuss what essential library services are. They're for everyone and they're available to them wherever they are. And also that these services should be equitable, whether the person is on campus or off-campus, or whether they're distance education students or wherever they are, that the idea of the equitable service is pretty important.

In some cases, when people provide distance education services, they tend to think of things like library and other student support services as a bonus to what they offer. If a student gets a library service and they live in a different state and they're taking classes on a campus some people tend to think, or some institutions think, well, they could always find that service somewhere else, and they leave it up to the student or the learner to go find it for themselves. And one other thing that the ACRL guidelines delineate is that that's really not a good way to provide your service, and it's not acceptable.

What I have here, I've listed the exact name of the guidelines and I'm going to go ahead and send to you that URL so it'll open up — or it should open up — in another window on your computer, and go directly to those guidelines. And you're welcome to spend as long looking through these or bookmarking them if you wish to.

The guidelines were developed by ACRL, which is the Association for College and Research Libraries, and they cover a whole range of things from management and finances to facilities, services and education. So there's quite a bit of topics discussed that we won't cover today. We're just going to focus on the service issue.

But the top four highlights I've picked out for you, in case you don't want to read that right now, the first is the idea of equivalent sources provided off campus and on-campus. And I mentioned that one already.

The second issue that they mention is the idea that these services must be provided in collaboration with other campus agencies, that no institution can have just one unit handle all these things alone. There should be a seamless integration so that the student doesn't have to try and poke around to find what's offered to them.

The third guideline is the idea of the lifelong learning. And that the courses provided and the programs created shouldn't just stand alone as academic credits and units, but should give to the students some sense of the bigger picture of the goals and the outcomes expected of them as learners over the composite of all the classes they take. And so that is a number of different kinds of skills and resources that should be provided, rather than there just being one particular course and one assignment that satisfies a particular goal.

And the fourth and final highlight is the idea of the library being integrated into an overall program. And I think that what is so powerful about that statement is the idea that these things have to be integrated into the types of assignments students have and the projects and their personal experiences to make them be meaningful. And unless it's practiced and transferable, it won't actually be learned by them. And so they need to be given a basis for the things that they need to cover, and also a way to know how to continue to update themselves.

So those are the top four things mentioned in the guidelines, though there are obviously a lot of other specifics that I'm not going to cover today.

The next thing that I thought I would mention is just a little bit of a definition of a distance learner that I covered and I think this probably goes without saying, but it can never hurt to repeat something. This is a quote from Mary Helen Jones and Thomas Moore. And they talk about the idea that a student in the residence hall or at home ten miles away from campus or even a thousand miles away from campus could be someone considered to be the periodic distance learner, whose needs are not [that] different just from someone who is really far away and close by. And I think it's really important that idea, that whatever kinds of services that you create for a distance education student, will be the same kinds of things that someone who is a traditional student but wants to work in their own room will find useful.

And the way I tend to think of it is, even if I'm not in a distance education program, I think of the services that I myself want. I really wish I could renew these things online, or I wish I could return these through the mail; I wish I could get this article copied for me and delivered to my office. And if those are the kinds of services that you want, those are probably the kinds of services your students want, and everyone can benefit from developing and supporting these types of programs.

Now, the next part that I have for you is a question — and so let's see if I can pull up the question for you — about the kinds of services that you consider essential for an academic library to offer. And I'm going to look through some of the comments that have been coming in and I want you to see if you can name — certainly doesn't have to be exhaustive — but some of the services that you would think an academic library should offer. And I'll give you about one minute.

I see one of the comments that came up on the board, while I'm waiting for some people to register some answers, or at least a couple of the services that you consider essential. And one of the questions mentions that this seems like it's much broader than the idea, the essential library services for distance education.

One of the connections that I was going to make after we look at these is the idea that those types of services that you find essential in a traditional library are going to be very similar to the list of eight essential library services that I'm going to be discussing today. I promise that it will connect back to this particular talk.

Okay. I see we have about thirty-eight people or so responding. So, let me see if I can collect a couple of more and then I'll show you the results.

I see a couple of people on here whose names I recognize, which is really nice.

Okay. I'll give you a chance to kind of look through these. On the next slide, I'll be talking a little bit more about the eight that I've mentioned, but I can see here some of those are listed by people already. The idea of reference assistance and reference materials; books; interlibrary loan; all kinds of published material seems pretty important on what people are talking about; some consulting and reference service; and instruction.

So a lot of the issues that we'll be talking about today are going to be ones that you've mentioned here that you consider pretty important for a traditional student.

Let's go ahead and look at my list.

And here's my list of eight essential library services. Not sure if anyone — I hadn't noticed it — but one of them that I'd mentioned was a website and maybe that's just too obvious now. But I hadn't actually seen that one when I skimmed through the answers. Maybe I missed it. A lot of the other ones that I've mentioned here, people have mentioned and in my list, these are what I consider the core traditional library services that we should be now offering in a new environment, or using new technologies for our distance learners. And I'll be going briefly through each of these and also mentioning the examples of institutions that offer the services next.

Before we continue, and I see some people are sill mentioning some other resources, does anybody have any questions that they want Susan to pose to me about what we've discussed so far about the library's educational role and the types of services and who our distance learners are? And these core eight services before we talk about each of them more in depth and explain a little bit about their importance, are there any questions that anybody has so far?

SUSAN: I think the questions, Beth, so far, have been both technical and perhaps a little further down the line than what you've addressed so far.

BETH: Okay. So you're keeping track of this for me. That's good.

SUSAN: I am.

BETH: Okay. Sounds great. So let's go ahead and work through these eight and we'll do this pretty quickly so we can take more questions and discuss some of the bigger picture issues of managing these kinds of services and so on at the end.

The first service that I've mentioned is the website. And one of the things that I think is starting to grow and it’s sort of become a little bit more accepted is the idea of the website actually being not just a resource from the library but being a representative of the library overall. It's the online gateway to everything that our libraries offer, points you even to the physical resources that we have and points you to the actual physical libraries; if you have maps and hours, that’s as well.

But for a distance learner, this is actually, in a lot of cases, the main site that they're going to go to, especially even the younger generation gravitates towards a lot of the online resources first, naturally. And so to have a comprehensive and well-maintained website is as valuable for a far away distance learner as one just across town.

I mentioned that I think it's really important for these to be clear and free of library jargon and terms that people don't understand. That's very easy to say and very hard to do in practicality is to keep a website useful to the user rather than useful to the library staff. And as you create a distance education site, which you'll notice on the left hand side as PICT 2, and again, these are just two that I think seemed fairly comprehensive and will give you — if you don't have a website — this maybe is complete as you think it might be, that you could look and see what these have to offer.

The other thing that's a little bit disturbing is how difficult it is sometimes to find the link to a library's website or the distance education services from a distance education course page or from the distance education program page. It can be confusing to figure out what things are available to you and where they are. And so at the least level, what we need to do is look and see where have we linked this to and where have we linked it from. But what institutional pages should have this information offered from it?

The main question I have on this page is how can your library's website provide better service to students working alone? That's a rhetorical question. I'll have one for each of these slides.

What could you do to make your website more usable for the student who needs to work on their own and find these answers without someone right in the computer lab next to them to ask the questions of? So that would be a quality website if you could answer that question well.

The next service that we have is reference and consulting. And a lot of people mentioned this as one of the main ones. Some way to get assistance or help. And there's tons of ways that this can be offered. The most common, and has been offered for a long time, is e-mail. And increasingly, new technologies are available for people to provide reference and technical consulting. Some libraries even do consulting about writing or choosing research paper topics, slightly different from reference, and all of those things can be incorporated into one seamless type of assistance.

Some of the main software that I haven't mentioned that has been talked about more recently is software like NetAgent and LivePerson, and those kinds of software programs work a lot like a call center, customer service style. And that's what a lot of libraries are moving towards is some kind of software that manages the large number of people we may have logging in at the same time and asking extended or longer-term questions. Being able to handle when a lot of people ask the same question and having a standard reply.

And so services like those that you could buy from companies are a lot different than just the straight e-mail that may require people to repeat the information a lot and that sort of thing.

The biggest issues here I think are being able to offer reference and consulting at reasonable hours, and when I say that reasonable is not necessarily business hours, but when do you think that most of your learners are going to need access? And maybe that's not necessarily twenty-four hours a day, which would accommodate people from any part of the world taking a class, but how can they be extended from what we might normally consider to be reasonable? And that will obviously affect staffing and technology issues throughout our libraries and campuses.

Another issue that comes up is the limitations that a lot of libraries currently put on their reference requests. You can only request if you're from this campus, or if you have this certain e-mail address from our campus and so on. And a lot of those restrictions are going to have to go away and be re-evaluated so that we can provide access to all of our students that are taking classes, either just in our area or from our program that live in different areas.

One way we can do this — I mentioned that we can collaboratively provide these kinds of services, and I say that you can collaboratively provide them by having staff in different libraries with different expertise. You can collaboratively provide these with different departments on campus. So, for instance, the writing center, and your computing center and your library might all be logged into the same kind of reference and consulting software to provide to distance learners so the learner doesn't have to choose who they need to ask the question of, but it can be answered by the right person instead.

And the last thing that I want to mention here, as well, is the idea of a toll-free number. And traditionally, people have called in, maybe they have one phone line and they might be using it to connect and they need to be able to call from their own phone, and get help. And a lot of institutions have created 1-800 numbers. If your institution doesn't have one and you're looking to provide that kind of service, the voice over the Internet technology that's sort of coming up now, where you can be online and also speak through the computer and answer those kinds of questions, can be useful technology to look into.

I've mentioned again on this slide three particular examples of different kinds of services provided, in this case, in California, Michigan and through the Library of Congress. And the last one being a collaborative project that's being different groups from institutions and research organizations from around the country are providing information about their expertise into a big database. And also providing assistance based on their normal working hours. So as time changes and we go from time zone to time zone, people who are in an office during normal working hours are providing the assistance and, collaboratively, they're providing reference assistance twenty-four hours a day.

So there's some kinds of things like that can be really useful.

The question I have for you about this topic is how will your library accommodate the demand for longer hours and immediacy of service?

As you look at the providing the service, you need to think about what kinds of things can go away or how can you make a balance between the traditional services and the new, to provide equitable service for distance learners?

The third topic that we have here, the third library service, is reciprocal borrowing. I won't talk too much about this one because it's been around for so long that I think most libraries already have had this in place for quite a while.

Reciprocal borrowing has worked out very well through a lot of the library consortiums, whether they're state, different types of libraries that collaborate, or maybe different public libraries that collaborate, or universities within a system that have worked out agreements to share different types of resources, traditionally books, and also magazines and articles.

And one of the questions that comes up here is determining, if you don't have these types of programs, or you need to reassess them, which materials can be borrowed and what types of fees should be assessed for mailing and copying those types of services?

I was recently speaking in the Netherlands and one of the topics that came up was distance education and it was interesting to hear how many institutions from around Europe don't consider reciprocal borrowing to be a given, that they will provide that to their distance education students. They were a little nervous about the idea of mailing out their books far away and if they were going to get them back in time and if there would be late fees or if they'd get lost, and how much it would cost to do.

So it's sort of interesting that, I think at least in my own mind, I've considered this something that will certainly happen and we could do this and it's not something special and new that we're providing.

So there's a different perspective and along the right hand side, again, I've chosen just three different kinds of organizations that do provide programs for distance education students, or that can work collaboratively within states.

So it's an interesting way to look at what’s accepted or expected from different institutions.

Okay, the fourth service that we have here is document delivery which is very similar, I think, to reciprocal borrowing, but in this instance, I’m using it in the term of it’s a document rather than full book or a full item. It’s actually usually more of an article or something that’s not available in full text. And again, I think this is the kind of thing that has become very prominent and expected. Might be a little different if you’re providing some sort of document delivery service to your students on campus, who can then come in and pick up the materials, than if you were providing this through somebody else where you had to fax it, or mail it, or express mail it to their house for them.

And a couple of the issues that come up are how are you going to decide what types of delivery mechanisms and what type of fees you’re going to charge to provide these kinds of services? The question here is: what types of fees is your library willing to charge for customized services like this?

On the right hand side, again, are two institutions: the University of Iowa, who has a document delivery service that seemed very thorough; and secondly, in the Florida Library Information network, mentioned that they provided courier service for over two hundred institutions within their state, of all different types.

So these are the kinds of services that you can provide yourself, or obviously can be contracted out to commercial entities.

Okay, a few are getting short on time, so we’ll move through these next four, the last half. The fifth item we have is reserve materials, and everyone’s probably familiar with these. What’s become really interesting about materials is that professors put on reserve whether they’re a full book, or a particular article they’d like the class to all read. Increasingly, they’ve become clips from videos or sound recordings they’d like the class to hear. Sometimes they can be old tests or they could actually be the lectures themselves being offered. And sometimes professors put these up on reserve so students could go back and share the materials as a class, and get to them. And accommodate sort of their different times, and maybe if they’ve missed something or they want to get some supplementary materials for their course.

The biggest issues with reserves have always been copyright, and how to provide these materials just for the class under the fair use principle. And one way that people are doing this, a lot of institutions are using software that has a password protection for the course. I mentioned on the right hand side — one of the software programs is called ERes, and, oh, I don’t know, a couple hundred institutions that I talked to had ERes, and a couple hundred universities and colleges have chosen this particular software for their electronic reserves. It’s an off-the-shelf product, so you can buy it and, once you set it up, any faculty member that has an account under service can then fax in their reserve materials and it turns it into a PDF file that can automatically just be put up to the reserve system that the library has.

So, obviously, really interesting and useful to programs for distance ed students where they could access them from anywhere. And also really interesting from the point of view of creating reserve materials and no longer would someone have to sit and simply scan in everything and take all the time to proofread. It’s a pretty easy process to just send it straight from your computer or from the fax machine and turn it into a file that has a pretty good quality in the reserve system.

The other system that I wanted to mention is that the New York University, in their library, has been offering for a couple of years now, audio and video streamed reserves. And this is a particularly interesting area. There might be other people who are logged in today whose libraries offer this. But in the large part, most people are just experimenting in small scale. There’s all sorts of issues about copyright and access for these types of materials, and also the organization of these materials for different programs. And so that’s a really good institution to look and see and learn from some of the experiences that they’ve had.

The question for this area, if you don’t this particular service, is who will manage the copyright clearances and digitize any necessary materials for reserves?

Okay, let’s move to, I believe it’s the sixth topic, which is the electronic content. And I debated whether or not to include this. Electronic content could be considered a service or it could be considered a resource. And I think most of these issues people are probably fairly familiar with if they’ve been providing online access to resources for their on-campus students. Particular content that you can create or purchase is important. I’ve mentioned digitization projects that different libraries do. I’ve mentioned particularly the Library of Congress, but many institutions have their own digitization projects for special collections on campus or local history issues that can be valuable to people taking a distance ed program, or course that’s related to a specialty of that institution.

In most cases, libraries are buying materials that have already been created in electronic format, like electronic books. I mentioned only one collection which is in that library. And the Consortium has bought a large number of these. The University of Texas often itself has bought other subscriptions to different collections of electronic books from that library. So I can answer questions about those later, as well.

Besides that, the idea of the online articles that are available in full text is very important. And providing those in different formats for easy reading for adaptive technology issues, but also for students to be able to not only read it but save it, and hopefully be able to save it without paying per-viewing charge for what they’re getting. It is increasingly important for students to have access to the proxy servers, so that they can access all this content remotely, regardless of where they’re from, once your institution knows that there are student enrolled in some program, then they’ll give them access. And of course, all that would have to be managed through the contract agreements when they’re initially signed.

The question on this line is: what types of online sources are available to your distance education students, and do those services provide enough of variety and depth for the types of projects you want your students to complete?

I’ve mentioned ScienceDirect as the other two electronic content providers to give some idea of the types of journal articles and resources that are possible to provide for students.

The next area is library instruction and this is a particular favorite of mine, since this is my specialty in library. I’d be happy to talk about any of these later, as well, but we’ll give a quick overview. And, in this, the question that I’m going to ask is how will your program provide a progression of information literacy skills?

One of the biggest issues in instruction is we do teach traditional things, like searching particular resources, but also all those new skills that I mentioned earlier about evaluation information and tying skills learned in one class to another class, and being able to make judgments about different types of sources. So when students do graduate and go out into a profession, or continue on into another educational program, they have a good sense of what types of information is available to them and how to be discerning about what they’re choosing and using for their projects. I think it’s really imperative that we use active learning techniques in the library component. And as well as using it in any synchronist or asynchronist distance education program, where students don’t just listen, but also have some projects that they can work on and develop on their own, and ask questions of.

Instruction can be provided — and this is particularly close to my heart — through tutorials and subject-base guides as well as through presentations like this, where a librarian could come and speak to a distance education program about a particular project through a chat board or through some other type of video conferencing or webcasting program. But there can also be these materials created and then tailored for particular classes where there may not be enough of us to meet the needs of all of these students, and by creating more generic types of materials that can then be adapted in their assignment to a course. Students learn the foundational skills and then learn to apply them. And we can then meet the growing numbers of students’ needs in a more efficient way.

The other part of instruction that I think is really important is the idea of the partnership between the faculty and the librarians. And this is as true in a traditional, on-campus environment as it is online. The idea that the librarian is there to support looking at what the assignment is and helping students to find the right kind of resources and start to learn the process of what they go through and what kinds of things are available to them. And these things don’t happen just when a librarian comes and talks for a little bit or students are pointed to the library’s web page but never told to use it. And so there is a strong importance for this type of aspect. Not just including libraries’ web site in a course material, but building on these skills, and using the librarian as a resource for the students.

The three things that I’ve mentioned in the model programs on the right hand side, the first is the TILT program that Pat mentioned at the very beginning, which is the online tutorial that we created here at the University of Texas for first year college students to learn basic information literacy and research skills. It’s in three modules. Students are welcome to come and visit the site and do it from whatever campus they’re from, on our server. And we’ve also released it under an open publication license where any institution can come and download that site and tailor it or use it in any way, and adapt it for their own institution if they wish.

This second is SourceFinder from Virginia Military Institute, and that’s a particular site where you can generate subject base guides on the fly. Based on the type of project you’re interested in, you can tell it what it is, and it pulls from all their resources, and suggests some places you might start.

And the third is the UWired Program at the University of Washington, which is actually a physical collaborative project between faculty and librarians that they’re also now modeling in online environments.

And so, those are three totally different types of projects that fill in this range of instruction.

The last essential service that I wanted to mention is information management tools. And this is sort of a bigger picture, not something that a student may actually use themselves or benefit from directly, like reciprocal borrowing, or reserves or instruction. This is one of the foundation services that I think we should provide, where we create spaces and information, I guess, information architective systems is how it describes it, where we manage and archive student’s information. And the best example of that is really the network digital library at Virginia Tech, where they’ve created an area where, as you do online projects, and in this case create electronic versions of dissertations, that the library is providing a place for all of these to be organized, and kept and maintained.

And that same type of thing is really important for distance education overall. The library can be a place where we provide the tools and the spaces for people to share files and to store things: documents and projects that they’ve created or are working on.

And, lastly, I think it’s also important for the question for this section to say what are the communication services and the file sharing and storage services available for your students to use in tandem with their courses?

So those are the eight core services that we’ve talked about: websites; reference and consulting; reciprocal borrowing, which is also inter-library loan; document delivery; reserve materials; content with remote access; instruction; and information management tools.

The next question that I have for you and the last question that we have is a poll that I’m going to send to you is what type of services does your library or your institution already offer at what you’d consider a satisfactory level? Having heard of the range of things that can be provided and the types of skills that your students need, which of these would you say you feel that your institution already meets the needs of entirely?

I’m going to give you just a second to go ahead and vote on as many of those as you want.

A lot of places do a couple of these things very well. And then there’s some things that need improvement and some services maybe that just aren’t offered at all. And those are the areas to look at a little more.

I see most people have answered, so we’re putting up those responses in just a little bit to see where we fall, and what areas you yourself know you need to improve in. This will be an interesting perspective to see, from the people who have attended this, what areas are the ones that are most often provided or we feel like we’re doing the best in so far.

Now it looks like we have a total of about sixty people responding, so you can get an idea of the numbers from that total to see how they’re doing so far.

One of the questions I see that’s come up is the idea of how these types of services are different — I think this is the question I’m seeing — are different for advanced students, people in graduate programs and doctoral programs, and how that might be different in an online environment than use generic skills.

One of the things I can say is a lot of the resources that would be provided are obviously going to be similar. But to me it seems that somebody who’s in a more advanced program is still going to need the kinds of reference and consulting services and the kinds of instruction services we can provide, but in somewhat more of a tailored way. And that is obviously the part where I’m saying that the librarian comes into play. That I don’t think it can be expected that, just because the student has made it to graduate school, they have the same kind of experience — they have enough experience, I guess is what I want to say — as an undergraduate, to be able to translate those skills into a more in-depth focus or field, that they’re prepared. They may have heard these types of skills, they may have practiced them a bit, but for my experience of working with graduate students on campus, those are the ones who actually seem most thirsty for going over these types of skills again. And the same would be true in an online environment, that it’s not enough I think to assume that they know how to manage this information and know the skills that they need when they go out in the business world.

I see that we’re getting really close to the end, so I want to cover really quickly the last couple of slides, or a few last slides so we don’t run over too long, and see, if we stay on a little longer, to take any questions next.

The part that I wanted to mention are just five key points and again we’ll put these slides up on the WCET site so you’ll have access to go back and see anything again that you don’t get this time.

But I wanted to mention the requirements for making these kinds of services sustainable and useful overall, not just for one course and not just designed on an ad hoc basis, but how do we implement these kinds of essential library services for all sorts of distance learners? And obviously the main things are administrative support, that the policies need to be in place and the construct, the idea that these are valuable skills, needs to come from the administration who can help negotiate the contracts that are needed and set the policies for how these services will be applied.

The second is the idea of technical support, and obviously somebody is going to need to manage the servers and the technology. If we’re going to provide electronic books, then there going to have to come in all sorts of formats and downloadable for all different technologies and someone will need to test that. If we’re going to be providing online reference services and that type of information, then we’re still going to be looking at how does that work on all different platforms and with all number of users.

The third area is staff training, not only for the library staff or for the faculty teaching a particular course, but creating kind of a better knowledge base for all of the staff who are going to come in contact with distance learners: to know what kinds of training is provided; and how to do these types of services; what sort of trouble shooting techniques need to go on; and also the theory behind why these services are provided, and how to provide them at a quality level.

The fourth area is collaboration. I’ve mentioned it a number of times; the idea that these have to be provided in a seamless way. That working with other student services and other departments rather than just on an individual basis is really imperative.

And overall, the last idea is that these services have to come together, and that we share our expertise and that we’ll be learning from each other. So the requirements of these programs is not just working with one institution to make one student be able to access resources from somewhere or learn certain skills, but working overall to decide what are the core skills students need to learn from the program; and what kinds of core services do they need to succeed; what sort of outcomes do we want from the program? And then looking to meet those as a group, to decide and be forward thinking about what we want to provide overall. That can tie to the accreditation issues and also to the learning outcomes that are being expected from all of our program.

The next slide I just thought I’d mention; three general models. You can go back and look at these again. The first is the idea of Central Michigan University has worked with their College of Extended Learning to create a partnership between their distance education and library services. So if you’re looking for how you can work together and create integrated model, that’s a good example.

The second is the University of Wyoming that recently published an article about looking at their whole strategic plan of how to provide equitable services, within the range of the staff they have and how they were going to then accomplishing it.

And the third level is Jones International University that has recently allowed students to decide for themselves the level of library service that they want, and they can select and choose and pay depending upon the level that they want to get. So, you can choose different strategies and what the students or the learners themselves decide.

And that leads into the last idea that I won’t have too much time to discuss now. The three main features for any type of online service and student service are these three goals. And the first is the idea of convenience: that people’s expectations have risen. They want easy access and immediate response to the questions that they have. They want something real time. So being able to provide real-time reference and not making someone wait for a day, or two days, or three days for a response is very valuable.

The second is personalization. Things being customizable and flexible for users’ interest, and being able to change that as they evolve and develop more and more skills is really important. To allow them to choose the manner in which they request the service, and the level that that information is offered can be far more satisfying to them and will allow us as an institution to meet the niche market. So if there is a program that has a lot of people from a particular company, or a particular level of programs together, being able to tailor to the backgrounds that they have is really important.

And the third issue is collaboration. And that’s the idea of focusing on the idea of distance education program being a community, and a lot of the resources and the support services that we create for those students will help them succeed. Whether it’s being able to allow them to communicate better or share resources, it’s also important to provide these kinds of services that they would find overall, so they can extend their knowledge; so that they can create better arguments; and that they can draw upon expertise not just from the instructor and from the other people in the department, but from the resources we would traditionally provide to a student in any format.

So that’s the end of my talk, which has brought us really close to the end of time. I haven’t had a chance to see too many of the comments go by, but I’ll be interested in looking back over those. What I’ll do is, give Susan a chance, so let me know if there’s any particular areas that I should address.

SUSAN: Well, there is one and that’s from the student’s perspective regarding access to the Internet and having limited bandwidth to access all the wonderful things we’ve been talking about.

BETH: So what should we do for that, is the question?

SUSAN: Yes, do you have a perspective for what library services can do to address limited access of users?

BETH: Well, a lot of the issues. From my perspective a lot of the issues with the adaptive technology and ADA issues for Americans with Disabilities, that if you design and provide services that can meet the needs of students with disabilities and students with limited ability to see particular materials or to read online; if you design things in a good environment that is useful for that particular market, there will be a lot of those same things that will apply to other students.

One thing that I found in working and developing our tutorial for our students is that there are a lot of students who work on campus and who have high speed connections because they have cable modems and that sort of thing at home. And then there’s another group of students who have slower phone line connections and not very reliable connections. And we’ve tried to provide services in sort of a two-tiered level where if you have a fast connection, then there’s the kind of high end services and if you have lower end connection, we provide those same things as best we can, maybe with a text only interface. Or maybe without plug-ins required, or without Java script required.

So we can still provide the service, but I think sometimes we need to look at providing it in a two- or three-pronged approach so that the majority of students who do have access on a higher level can do so.

SUSAN: Do we have time for one more question?

BETH: I do, but I’m not sure if they do.

PAT: Let’s take one more.

SUSAN: Well, there’s also been a lot of interest regarding virtual universities, or those campuses that don’t have their own bricks and mortar library. And then the issue of accreditation: You’ve talked about contracting library services, but can you tell us any specific requirements for a virtual learning institution and what they need to follow?

BETH: Hmm, I don’t know of any particular accreditation issues, for I just don’t now that area very well to know what is required of them from their accreditation agencies. I think one of the things that has been interesting are the universities that have started, the new universities that have started and the virtual universities that felt that it would be sufficient to have no library at all and to rely on the other institutions and the other public libraries, or students own pocket books to buy the resources that they needed.

I’m not entirely sure — I know my own philosophy about it — I’m not entirely sure how well they’ve succeeded, but I think probably the burden of those students’ research fell to the institutions around them that were not being paid by those students to provide them. I still believe it’s very valuable to have those materials. There’s nothing that beats having the variety of perspectives and sources that students will learn from when they go into, let’s say, even a corporation. They’ll be exposed to a range of publications; trade publications; online materials; a wide variety of resources that they should become familiar with while they’re being educated. And although they can ask for those on-call, and I think that’s sufficient, there’s an example of Stevens Institute of Technology, I believe it is, that had an article a couple of years ago, that they decided to cancel all of their periodicals because the subscriptions were too high and every article that someone on campus needed, the library covered the cost of getting that through document delivery.

So every article that the institution provided to every student, not just distance education students, was provided that way. And it was a model that worked all right for them. There were a lot of other institutions in the area that they could draw from that weren’t too far away, and that they paid and worked out an agreement with.

So I think if the institution can find a way to make it work for them, that will be fine, but I don’t think it’s probably a model that would work overall.

PAT: Okay, Beth, thank you very much. This was an excellent way to kick off our new series on student services. I want to end this presentation with a little more information about where you can get more information.

First of all, I want to tell you that this series was brought to you as part of WCET’s work on our Learning Anytime, Anywhere Partnership Project called the Beyond the Administrative Core: Creating Web-based Student Services for Online Learners. It’s funded by the U.S. Department of Education and Beth is a member of the advisory board for this project.

If any of you have colleagues who could not attend today and would like to attend this presentation, you probably have seen notes along the way here it has been recorded and it will be available from a link on our web site and the web address there is at the bottom of the slide.

MATT: Yes, and the archive information should be ready sometime, probably tomorrow morning. So I’ll notify Pat when it’s ready. Then she’ll be able to send a link out to all of you.

PAT: Oh, that’s great, Matt, thank you. Also, I just want to tell you that our next presentation will be on October 17th at noon mountain time. Darlene Burnett who works with IBM’s Best Practice Partners will provide an overview of trends in electronic services.

So if you’d like to learn about Darlene and to look up updates of our schedule we’re still confirming the presentations in this series. Please go to the address on the screen. And we thank you for attending today and we look forward to meeting you online on October 17th.

And now we’d like to ask you to fill out a little evaluation form that will tell HorizonLive what you thought about this presentation. And thanks again to Beth and for Susan for helping to make this presentation possible.