Unless you've been asleep for the past five years or so, you are well aware that more and more colleges and universities are turning to the euphemistically-phrased "distance learning," as a way to increase student enrollment and meet the public's demand for convenient access to higher education. As birth-rates declined following the baby boom, the supply of traditional, college-bound 18-year-olds lessened; now, what colleges are getting are more older adults returning to school part-time, whose work schedules or other responsibilities prevent regular class attendance.

Like other successful American enterprises adapting to the service economy of the 90's, colleges realize that they have to make it convenient for consumers to buy their product. Therefore, you are no longer necessarily required to drive long distances to reach the campus: instead, the campus comes to you. There are even some current efforts (for example, the new Western Governors University in Denver, Colorado) to do away with a physical campus and its inevitable library altogether. The first paragraph of WGU's mission statement reads: "To remove the obstacles of both time and place to postsecondary education opportunities for individual and corporate citizens of the West by developing and demonstrating innovative, cost-effective approaches to delivering education through the use of rapidly evolving advanced technology" <http://www.wgu.edu/>. If this sounds like a revolution in higher education, you are right: it is.

Regrettably, institutional commitments to library support for distance learning programs have not always been as strong as they might have been, to the degree that students enrolled in such courses have sometimes had to fend for themselves in their attempts to access relevant library services and collections, despite the fact that the Association of College and Research Libraries' Guidelines for Extended Campus Library Services (first issued in 1981, revised and updated in 1990, and currently undergoing yet another revision) stress the parent institution's responsibility ". . .for providing support which addresses the information needs of its extended campus programs." In many cases, the best that academic librarians and off-campus faculty could do for distance education classes was to compile packets of course-related readings, deliver deposit or reserve collections to the sites where classes were offered, and provide interlibrary loan or courier services via a nearby library. In some cases, particularly where no convenient access to a local library existed, books and articles were mailed directly to the student. None of these approaches, however, resulted in library services that approximated those available at the campus library, despite requirements by most regional accrediting agencies that something like equivalent library services be available to off-campus students.

The Director at my own institution took the accrediting association's demands literally, however, and in 1991, hired me for the specific purpose of meeting the library needs of our off-campus students. As an academic librarian committed to providing support to off-campus students, I soon found myself in a bit of a dilemma. For generations, the prevailing philosophy was that students should be taught to do their own research and retrieval of materials, because it was believed that the activities involved in identifying and locating materials were an integral part of the learning process. From at least the 1960's onward, such beliefs led to increasing emphasis on bibliographic instruction, which has since been expanded into the trendy concept of "information literacy."

Providing library instruction to West Georgia's distance education students, however, was often a physical impossibility. My attempts to meet their library needs evolved into supplying them with everything required in order to complete their term papers and other projects, up to and including doing their research for them and supplying the necessary journal articles and books. As time went on, more and more students learned about and began to use the service, and I received an amazing amount of unsolicited and very gratifying positive feedback from my clientele. Eventually, I arrived at the rather shattering realization that I had secretly begun to feel very defiant about the library world's foundational belief in the necessity of BI.

I now think that the services we provided to off-campus students are precisely what the majority of users really want and what we ought to be offering them. In other words, not only is distance education the model for higher education in the next millennium, but the kinds of library support services often supplied to off-campus students can and should be the prototype for future library services as well. Research services customized to users' real needs are going to become the norm, rather than the exception, and librarianship as a profession will not survive unless we wake up and recognize that the era in which we could get away with insisting that customers come to our building in order to get our product (not to mention, do it all themselves!) is nearly over. If we delude ourselves about this much longer, I am certain that people will start finding ways to get their information needs met by others who are more accommodating than we have traditionally been.

A simple comparison between what librarians do, with the work of another well-known profession, may make this clearer. If you have a legal problem, you don't visit an attorney so that you can be shown how to locate previous cases relevant to yours and get suggestions on how you might defend yourself in court. Instead, you gratefully hand over a retainer and trust that the lawyer will use his/her professional abilities to the utmost on your behalf. The analogy is obvious: instead of truly serving our library customers as other professionals do, we instead mislead and frustrate them by tacitly promising that they can acquire the same sophisticated skills that we possess after a brief bit of instruction at the Reference Desk or in a BI class. The truth is that we ourselves are largely responsible for the poor public image of librarians, because we continually try to convince users that the difficult and complex work we do is really easy, when we know perfectly well that it is not.

Few library users have either the time or inclination to attempt to acquire professional searching skills in a crash course at the Reference Desk. People know that librarians can do information research better and faster, and they want us to use our skills to meet their needs. Rather than continue to complain about the lack of jobs for librarians, libraries should add to the range of available service options, reasonably priced information retrieval and document delivery--and use the funds generated to hire more librarians to meet the increased demand which will inevitably result. As more and more distance education programs are developed, such services are going to be needed anyway, so why not start creating them now?

Modern library customers are beginning to expect and demand much more than librarians who are outside the sphere of distance learning support are usually willing to provide. As more and more information is available on the Internet and through commercial online services, librarians are in danger of being cut out of the loop entirely, not because people no longer need us, but because they think they no longer need us. And why not: we've spent years trying to convince them that they can do it themselves! With so many resources available as close as their home computers, those materials are what people will use--not because the information is the best, but simply because the access is convenient. Librarians experienced in serving remote users know all of this, and therefore must be the ones to lead the rest of the library world into the future.

References

"ACRL Guidelines for Extended Campus Library Services." College & Research Libraries News 51, no. 4 (1990): 353-5. [also available at http://ecuvax.cis.ecu.edu/~lbshouse/guide.htm]

Carol Goodson, State University of West Georgia
cgoodson@westga.edu
http://www.westga.edu/~cgoodson/

Carol Goodson is now Head of Access Services at State University of West Georgia, a library division which includes Off-Campus Services, Interlibrary Loan, Circulation/Reserves and Document Delivery. She received her M.L.S. degree from the State University of New York at Buffalo, and is the author of the recently published Complete Guide to Performance Standards for Library Personnel <http://www.neal-schuman.com/cgi/bookdetail.cgi?id=188>