DISTANCE EDUCATION LIBRARIANSHIP BENEFITS ALL STUDENTS

From one campus to another, there are many different organizational structures that provide library services to online learners and teachers. "Often what happens is that distance educators don’t think that libraries are paying attention to what they are doing, but most libraries actually are paying very close attention," says Maryhelen Jones, associate library director at Florida State University. "What distance education administrators will find out is that their students have a tremendous range of services already in place that were never publicized to them. Most libraries have really become full-service libraries through their presentation of the World Wide Web to all of their users."

Coordinating Efforts

As distance education grew at the University of Kansas (KU), for instance, Nancy Burich’s position evolved. In 2000, Burich moved from being Director of a KU branch library to Coordinator for Distance Learning Information Services for all of KU’s branch libraries.

"We were seeing more and more students going online, and they weren’t anyone’s responsibility," she says. "We decided to address the library resources and management issues for distance learning students. That became my job, to coordinate all of the efforts [of the KU branch libraries] and bring them together for distance learning students. In actuality, I was given the opportunity to write my job description, which is very broad and loose."

Burich adds that some of the typical distinctions of traditional distance learners have changed from females in their mid thirties returning to the workforce and business people trying to enhance their marketable skills to "just about everybody."

Increasing Access Points

In 1998, Anne Prestamo, then a science and engineering librarian, moved into her new position as Head of Digital Library Services at Oklahoma State University (OSU). In eight months, her department grew to three full-time librarians and a number of part-time, student-support staff. "We started to provide a lot more access points to online resources," she says, adding that OSU’s online journal entries have increased from 5,000 to more than 20,000 since 1998. "Adding all these resources has certainly benefited the off-campus students, but they are used equally, if not more, by people who are on campus everyday."

Communicating with Distance Ed

Prestamo adds that one of the real challenges faced by her department is "how to best communicate with not only the online faculty but also the support personnel who are helping faculty get their courses online. There is not a real unified, centrally administered presence for our distance learning programs [at OSU], so we rely on the library coordinators within each of the colleges to be our go-betweens with faculty who are teaching online. We have established some very good relationships with some of our faculty who are most active in teaching online courses, but the communication is always a challenge."

Philip Turner, dean of the School of Library Sciences and associate vice president for distance education at the University of North Texas, believes that the topic of online library services seldom comes up when departments start planning to put programs online. "My experience has been that online library services are not often at the forefront. For a department chair that is putting a program online, there are a lot of other things they are thinking about ahead of that."

Turner adds that regional accreditation bodies are looking "real hard" at the issue of distance education programs providing adequate library services to its patrons that are equivalent to what’s provided to on-campus patrons. "They want to know if you have thought about providing these services before you start off." Consequently, Turner cautions distance education administrations to plan out the online library services elements of their curriculums well in advance to developing and/or converting courses.

Integrated Model Meets Needs

Tom Abbott, dean of libraries and instructional support at the University of Maine at Augusta, explains that there are basically two models of distance education library services. "One is where the distance education library services are provided by a separate, unique unit, sometimes paid for by whomever is providing distance education on the academic side. The better model, we think, is one where it’s more integrated, with the academic side and the entire library staff all having some role in providing distance education library services.

"Everything is changing together," Abbott continues. "The academic programs are growing and changing to meet the needs of adult working consumers. That is where the most energy is. If the academic programs are changing to offer alternative delivery methods, including distance education, than obviously every other department - registrar, business office, financial aid, library, [etc.] - all need to understand that change.

"The library will adapt and adjust as a whole unit, and that is why I think the integrated model is better than picking one person and saying that he or she is the distance education librarian. The biggest benefit that we found as we worked with our distance students was that the services we created for them were even better than the services we had for our face-to-face students. Things like online advisement services and virtual library reference services are all different [than what libraries have provided in the past] but these services are more effective and better meet the needs of students and consumers."