Providing Library Services for Distance Education Students: A How‐to‐do‐It Manual

Citation

James, S. (2003), "Providing Library Services for Distance Education Students: A How‐to‐do‐It Manual", Library Review, Vol. 52 No. 5, pp. 234-235. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530310476760

Distance learning is nothing new, of course: correspondence courses and the like have been around over a hundred years and more. Nor is today’s lifelong learning and social inclusion environment anything new for libraries. What is different is the spread of distance education into “traditional” higher and further education providers and the technical means to back it up. And its international dimension: my own university’s first distance students were in Hong Kong and Singapore almost a decade ago: now we take distance students from the UK, as well as applying distance education techniques to students close to home or even on‐campus. So, discussion of how we provide library support is timely and informed by a body of practice. Many of us reach the same solutions independently, or come across the same obstacles: our first distance course was, I was told, entirely self‐contained and needed no library support. That notion lasted barely a week after the course began.

So, a comprehensive How to Do It Manual like this has plenty of contemporary significance: how much better to plan or develop a service by being well informed by other people’s experience. In that respect this is a particularly useful handbook. The first half comprises a manual of practice distilled from universities, largely in the USA but from other countries too, the first two sections dealing with: “Linking distance education and library services” and “Creating and implementing a strategic plan for supporting distance learners”. Part 3, “Learning from other libraries, universities and support programs” looks at some model programmes, virtual universities and emerging commercial services. This leads naturally into Part 4, a tool box of specific resources and collections of useful documents.

The range is pretty comprehensive, taking the user through a detailed procedure for planning and setting up a service, and raising all the important issues including legal and ethical ones. The examples in Part 3 are mainly from the USA with just one from the UK (University of Sheffield) and a couple from Australia; six commercial e‐library programmes are covered. All of these examples are brief (usually single‐paragraph) but convey the key features of each programme. The tool box is particularly useful, giving links to Web sites where model examples of agreements or documents may be found. The ARL guidelines are reprinted as are excerpts from or samples of specific universities’ policies or handbooks for distance education. There is also a good bibliography and the book is well indexed.

There are examples from elsewhere, but the work is heavily US‐based. In an international context this should not matter, except that in the UK especially (and other European countries) we have a much more collaborative approach to such matters. UK Libraries Plus is not mentioned: perhaps it is too recent to have been included, but the co‐operative approach which works well for many of us at both the local/regional and national levels is hardly covered. The emphasis – correct enough ultimately – is on what each library plans and does for its distance students from its own resources.

This is still a useful manual for those of us outside North America: it gives a good conceptual framework, covers all the important points in very practical terms and gives us plenty of interesting examples from which to pick and mix according to our local needs and circumstances. The author started a distance education library support programme from scratch in 1991 and learned as she went along: her experience and advice are most welcome to a wider audience. It will help anybody planning distance education library support from scratch to make sure they do not miss anything important; those of us who have been doing the work for some years will find it useful to review what we are already doing and how we might want to make changes and improvements.