This new annual contains eight articles and an 18‐page annotated bibliography. Peter Brophy and his colleagues at Manchester Metropolitan University are the editors and it has international experts on its editorial board. In the first article Brophy and MacDougall spell out the concept of lifelong learning and its implications for libraries. Burge and Snow “explore the relevance of librarians’ practices and outlooks to adult learner needs…” (p. 19) in a North American context. Levy “discusses some issues related to networked learner support in higher education” (p 35) where librarians “are challenged to develop new understandings of their professional roles…and to be active in establishing a firm stake in the changing educational environment” (p. 35). Line looks at the importance of lifelong learning and spells out what he sees as libraries’ required responses to new opportunities. UK public libraries are recommended, by Margaret Kendall, to exploit “computer‐mediated communication” and we are told that 80 per cent charge for Internet access and one of the big arguments is whether to permit e‐mail access. Allred’s article tells us about the Department for Education and Employment’s “Open for Learning” project 1992‐1995. His Figure 2 disappears in the process. The novel University of the Highlands and Islands is described by Adamson. The final article by Lock and Nordon “Hybrid librarians and distance learners…” is based on actual experience of providing a service at the University of Surrey and, to me, is the most useful.
There is a great deal of exhortation throughout the volume. Lifelong learning is a good thing and we should all be at it or serving it. Lock and Nordon know the difficulties involved. Generally, however, evidence on take up, drop outs, final success is hard to find.
“Evaluation studies investigating the achievement of goals…are as yet scarce” (p. 43).
The strengths and weaknesses of networked learning are dealt with but much more could be said about motivation – both the prospective learner’s and the institutions providing courses where the rush to register students and reduce unit costs can be a less than laudable motive. Similarly, the motives and actions of academic staff could be further explored – from the early crude attempts merely to digitise existing teaching materials to the tendency of academics to distrust anything “not invented here”. Perhaps such issues are not seen as any concern of librarians, yet they are fundamental to success.
Costs too could have featured more (in the next volume?), both those of the provider and the learner. These include the costs of revision and updating, which advocates tend to assume will be minimal, or at least less than conventional printed materials, until they try it. The efficacy of networked learning also needs attention, as does the issue of plagiarism made easy through “cut and paste” and leading to the submission of work which has not led to any learning. The Centre for Studies in Advanced Learning Technology is quoted as saying “these are claims in principle rather than guarantees” (p. 11).
The resources required to offer such services, from PCs to the expertise of course designers, computer personnel and the availability of suitable tutors, are not dealt with in any sufficiently considered way in this volume, perhaps simply because it is intended only for librarians. There is little factual information on what resources distance learners themselves have available. We do know that the provision of learning materials alone is not sufficient (p. 116). They need access to people, both their peers and expert staff, as well as other facilities. It is difficult to study photography without a dark room or navigation without (eventually) a boat. Even though such matters are beyond librarians’ responsibilities they are relevant to the resourcing issue and put our concerns over “information” provision into a proper context.
As usual the devil is in the detail. The University of Surrey experience spells out the practical problems including that of password control and the problems, caused by electronic services which exclude certain categories of students as well as the usual copyright difficulties. Technology, as usual, is in advance of social and legal conditions. We are told that the average request from a distance learner takes 30 minutes to process. At, let us say, 3,000 per annum per full‐time staff member, this is an expensive service. “The issue of resources and support for lifelong learning…is without doubt a Pandora’s box waiting to be opened by most UK higher education institutions” (p. 141). Many librarians may have met this problem already and have found institutional managements reluctant to provide the facilities really required. Surely using information and communications technology will be cheaper, easier, more effective?
The problem of selection of learning materials also needs to be dealt with. Even if this is seen as the responsibility of academic staff (and they tend to guard this area with some tenacity) librarians still have a duty to assist by bringing to their attention potentially suitable materials and sources. Competition between providers already exists, but how does an institution, let alone an individual, decide whether a course or materials offered by Bunker Hill is better than one from the University of Phoenix or the local college of further education other than by costs? Never mind about the problem of matching it to one’s personal learning style (if you are aware what that is). The principle of “least effort” probably still applies (p. 27). Traditionally, libraries have acquired items from which users select. Subject support for courses is different. Materials have to be selected or designed for particular effects to particular groups at specified times. Some expert having mastery of the subject determines these matters. They are tailored for a specific purpose, unlike a library’s offerings, except where it responds to a request. But in this case the library has not originated the request. It has not determined the learning which is to take place. Academics direct the learner (even if in subtle ways): librarians respond to users. This is a new area for some librarians. They have to become more like academics. Indeed, the early hope that by the year 2000 there would be a convergence of roles, with all those facilitators of learning being more or less indistinguishable, has not come to pass.
With online access academics may be encouraged to see libraries as even more peripheral to their real concerns. One can see this in the perennial problem of liaison; in the extent to which academics jealously guard their courses and reject standardisation and rationalisation of courses, even between neighbouring universities, or offers of assistance, despite Dearing (p. 47). They also tend to see information literacy as arising from the subject content of their course as it proceeds and not as a prerequisite for success – as the need to learn to learn – hence the difficulty still faced by librarians trying to offer tuition in information use, especially where it is not rewarded by academic credits.
The integration of access to resources, the hybrid library, convergence of services and co‐operation between libraries are all touched on in this issue. “Get involved” seems to be the message – with learners, with lecturers, with course design and delivery. Yet this was ever so. A good subject librarian would already be doing this. But it does take time, and as library staff to student ratios worsen time available for these activities reduces. They should take priority but keeping the doors open and doing the routine work can take precedence through sheer necessity. A matter of resources again. To understand the issues properly librarians need greater knowledge and experience (as this volume recognises) – to have experienced course design, running a course, lecturing, tutoring, student assessment etc. Yet the educational and professional routes we take may not have included such things. The nearest we may get, offering an equally useful, if additional, perspective from a users point of view, may be by having been a part time student, having taken a distance learning course, by being a mature student and so on.
An interesting volume yet, at over 40 pence per page, an expensive one. For £70 I would have expected a monograph of 500 pages plus, covering all of the topics mentioned above in some depth. Finally, one might ask whether these articles, rather than being directed at what must be a largely converted audience, might not have been better placed in existing educational journals as the advice given to readers is to join the educational enterprise by mixing with academics at their conferences. Why not then publish in their journals too?
