Libraries Without Walls 7: Exploring “Anywhere, Anytime” Delivery of Library Services: Proceedings of an International Conference Held on 14‐18 September 2007, Organized by the Centre for Research in Library and Information Management (CERLIM), Manchester Metropolitan University

Citation

James, S. (2009), "Libraries Without Walls 7: Exploring “Anywhere, Anytime” Delivery of Library Services: Proceedings of an International Conference Held on 14‐18 September 2007, Organized by the Centre for Research in Library and Information Management (CERLIM), Manchester Metropolitan University", Library Review, Vol. 58 No. 9, pp. 697-698. https://doi.org/10.1108/00242530910998017

Back in the 1990s my university was building a long overdue new library for our largest campus. I waited until the building was too well advanced to be stopped or altered before admitting to my vice‐chancellor that as fast as the building was going up I was encouraging my colleagues to develop services that would make it unnecessary for our students to come and use it. The pressures in our circumstances were many and varied: serving a large rural area with students in some remote communities; vocational and financial pressures on students; widening enrolments to distance learning courses; increasing numbers of part‐time students on short courses or following particular modules. Of course, services developed specifically for distance learners or students in remote areas also became attractive to our full‐time students.

Every institution's geographical, social, financial and other circumstances combine in different ways to give particular issues for library services, yet many of the underlying factors and the approaches to them are common to universities across the UK and across the world: I avoid the word “solution” as that is far too definitive a notion for such a fluctuating and challenging service. Solutions are fleeting: new challenges are constant.

The CERLIM Libraries Without Walls conferences have since 1995 addressed these challenges and this offering presents another set of valuable papers illustrating issues and approaches in a wide range of circumstances. While the overall subject is itself demanding, it also raises more fundamental questions about the role of libraries in the future. Some of these were addressed by Christine L. Borgman in her keynote paper “Disciplines, documents and data: emerging roles for libraries in the scholarly information infrastructure”. Here, specifically, questions of data curation are addressed and the role of the library – if indeed it has a role here – is discussed.

A further 22 papers look at a range of issues surrounding the electronic library and how its services underpin or react with academic programmes; or ideally, of course, how they become an integral part of academic programmes. One of the problems relating to distance learning and remote library access has always been the potential loss of the social dimension and student interactions within education. In that respect I found Jane Secker and Gwyneth Price's paper “Libraries as a social space: enhancing the experience of distance learners using social software” of particular interest.

In addition to papers explaining electronic library services, projects and access services in various countries or circumstances, other specific issues include information skills, service assessment and projects and services in several developing countries. Ethical challenges are addressed by Gill Needham and Kay Johnson, while a reminder that in a distance learning environment the academic library may no longer have exclusive rights over service delivery to students – not that it ever has even in more traditional book‐based services – comes from a paper by Robert Davies and Geoff Butters, “Public libraries, learning and the creative citizen: a European perspective”. In the age of lifelong learning the providers of learning materials and of support services may as likely be found outside the academic world as within it.

The conference was, as ever, well planned so that although not a formally structured overview of current thinking and progress, important current issues are raised and discussed. There is a good mixture of the theoretical and the practical, not so much in the choice of papers but in the discussions of wider implications from the specific services or projects described in the papers. The electronic library raises so many issues, both practical and theoretical, that there will be material enough for many conferences to come. My only comment on that is that students still seem to value book‐based services also, and certainly some of my own approach to remote student support rested in collaboration with local library services across a very wide area and across different sectors, as well as in electronic services. And despite my opening anecdote, students did (and still do) come to our new library and even continued to browse the shelves and borrow books from it as well as sit and use all the computers we provided. The hybrid library will remain a reality for us for some time yet, and that requires also looking at issues beyond the screen.