Guidelines for Colleges: Recommendations for Learning Resources

Citation

Turner, R. (2005), "Guidelines for Colleges: Recommendations for Learning Resources", New Library World, Vol. 106 No. 7/8, pp. 384-386. https://doi.org/10.1108/03074800510608701

This seventh edition comes five years after the last one and the need for current guidelines for the provision of learning resources is particularly driven by the demands of government agencies in areas such as social inclusion, accessibility for all, lifelong learning and empowering the learning community.

These guidelines have been written to assist learning resources managers of further education and sixth form colleges in the planning and development of their learning resources. Although the target of the advice is primarily information professionals in the further education sector, the recommendations and guidance are relevant throughout the education sector.

This edition of guidelines for colleges also builds on the results of the UK Survey of Library and Learning Resource Provision in Further Education Colleges 2003 (2003).

Each section of the book has clear key recommendations which are indicated at the beginning of each relevant chapter and there are quantitative performance indicators at the end of some. Owing to the variety of further education provision, the Guidelines for Colleges also has a useful glossary of acronyms.

There are ten general recommendations for further education colleges, along the lines of those already well established for secondary schools. These recommendations include that all further education institutions should have a learning resource service; they should play a key role in enhancing life skills; mission statements and policies should be tailored to the particular institution; the learning resource services should be part of a robust quality system; learning resource managers need to develop skills to make them more effective for the service; learning resource centres should cater for a variety of learning styles; they should be accessible to all students; they should develop broad collections in a variety of formats to address the needs of users; they should be manages by a Chartered member of CILIP who has a management position in the institution; the centre should be adequately funded.

The main body of the text is divided into eight sections. The first, Facilitating learning, covers information literacy, learning styles, leaner support, reader development and, particularly important, sectoral and cross‐sectoral collaboration.

A quality framework looks at management skills such as mission statements, aims and objectives for strategic and operational planning. There is heavy emphasis on quality policy, exploring performance measurement and indicators, benchmarking, user satisfaction, inspection and a management data checklist. This chapter, and some later ones, have useful references.

The third chapter looks at Promotion and advocacy. This vital subject, particularly acknowledged in the guidelines for secondary schools, is rather breathlessly and broadly covered in just a few pages.

The learning environment looks at more specific issues such as accommodation, space, design and layout, furniture, inclusiveness and health and safety.

The issue of Accessibility is addressed by a chapter that considers opening hours, electronic access, distance learning, equal opportunities, disability and widening social inclusion.

Collection development and management are also rather brushed over in three pages. Staffing issues are addressed in a Human resources chapter which includes the contribution of learning resource service staff to learning and teaching, the responsibility of staff, staffing structure and qualifications, staffing rules and functions, staffing levels and salary scales, and training and development.

The final chapter looks at Finance, specifically budget allocation, managing the budget and income generation.

The conclusion stresses that the guidelines are not meant to be prescriptive, but are designed to be used flexibly. The guidelines are intended to be comprehensive and should be viewed as guidance notes for those responsible for running learning resource services. A decent bibliography and adequate index complete the work.

I suppose that this book may be a useful term of reference for managers of information services in further and higher education services. However it is very general and provides little that the vast majority of learning resource service staff will not already know.

Guidelines for Colleges is considerably more wishy‐washy than the guidelines for secondary schools, which would be just as useful to the target audience, if not more so. New initiatives affecting colleges could easily be addressed by this CILIP group in library and information studies journals.

The layout is clear and it is easily read. At 65 pages it is certainly short, and at least six pages of these are references. Case studies and examples of best practice would certainly have enlivened this work. The blurb claims that the recommendations are “robust”, but there is no statutory obligations to provide a learning resource service and most of the recommendations are followed by the word “should” rather than “must”. There also seems little acknowledgement of the practical financial and student number demands on further education institutions, nor of the range of quality of further education provision in the UK.