My view of the future of library service for off-campus/distance education is discussed from the perspective of a set of commonly held assumptions regarding higher education. One assumption is that distance education is a growth industry for higher education institutions, as well as for commercial providers. Some have predicted that within ten years, 50% of students enrolled in higher education will be distance learners or will be studying in a distance learning environment. A second assumption is that off-campus students are at a disadvantage compared to their on-campus counterparts, in part, because of the lack of personal contact with faculty and other students and because of problems in gaining access to library staff and resources. A third assumption is that powerful and pervasive interactive technologies will continue to improve the delivery of education and library support at a distance.

Whether we agree or disagree with these assumptions, we cannot ignore their impact on each of the stakeholders in the educational process: administrators, students, faculty, accrediting bodies, and librarians. For administrators, the problem is clearly one of economics. Libraries are expensive, and resources are not easily duplicated at satellite sites. In the past, administrators have been unable to fund equally and staff off-campus facilities at desired levels. In the future, technology may help to alleviate the problem as electronic access can be provided to many more resources than libraries are able to purchase with diminishing budgets. For students with job and family constraints, the need for pursuing an education at a distance may mean the difference between having an education or not having one at all, making any disadvantages in terms of academic isolation an acceptable tradeoff. In the future, technology can help to reduce the isolation by providing many options for human interaction through electronic communication. For faculty, it is important that academic standards apply equally to off-campus classes. They need to be able to make library assignments knowing that distance students are able to access the library to complete them. In the future, technology will help to bridge the gap between the distant learner and the library. For accrediting bodies, standards and the review process can bring about the measure of quality assurance needed to bring off-campus programs into the higher education mainstream. In the future, technology will enhance delivery of education and access to libraries making it important to re-examine the standards to insure their relevance to an evolving academic setting. For libraries, the potential for user-centered, rather than library-centered, service will be enhanced, as less emphasis is placed on building collections and more on providing access to resources. In the future, technology will enable libraries to serve distant learners better through networked access and web connectivity. Library schools will need to take the lead here in educating the next generation of librarians, who must be computer literate and sensitized to the special needs of off-campus/distant learners. The curriculum of tomorrow's Library schools will need to reflect a new philosophy of service that is user-oriented rather that library-oriented.

In this context, there will be a convergence of off-campus library service with the library's need to serve a growing number of distance learners. Libraries and librarians will have to build new paradigms to serve the many invisible users remotely accessing library catalogs and online databases. The extended campus will be a part of every library's future for two reasons.

First, as more emphasis is placed on providing access to information, and less on building collections, the philosophy of library service that required users to come to the library for help and resources will no longer be dominant. Along with the paradigm shift to the electronic library will come the need for a new client-centered philosophy that encompasses remote users and distance learners. Service to the extended campus will become more the norm rather than the exception, and the client-centered service models developed for distant learners will move library service to off-campus and distance education into the forefront.

Second, as technology is used to further library connectivity, we can anticipate significant advances in the delivery of library support to off-campus/distant learners, minimizing the physical disadvantages previously encountered. With more and more academic libraries forming consortia on a statewide basis to provide common access to electronic records, there will be a kaleidoscope of options for distant learners to choose from in terms of Internet and web access, full-text retrieval, seamless document delivery from publisher to workstation, online reference service, and electronic communication. While geographic isolation and social disadvantage cannot be wholly eliminated for the distant learner, improvements can be anticipated in this area with existing technological advances. In the present multimedia, interactive, electronic environment, access to instruction and resources is greatly facilitated. Socialization of students can be accomplished through the use of e-mail, and electronic mentoring can help to compensate for the lack of faculty and student face-to-face contact. Electronic chat rooms can further enhance communications among distant learners. With the aid of powerful interactive technologies and the forging of statewide and regional alliances, education and library support will produce new synergies for cooperation in the absence of walls and institutions. Home librarians, not just off-campus librarians, will serve remote users and distant learners. This convergence will place both on the same trajectory, and distant learners will benefit from the new synergies developed.

In the next five years, the possibility of realizing even greater strides in library service to the extended campus can be anticipated with the economies of scale that will result from statewide cooperation. Libraries using webpacs will be able to reach out beyond the walls of the institution, expanding exponentially their collections, electronic resources, and expertise. Collectively, libraries will have access to a much larger body of resources than they would have been able to afford and acquire individually. This potential will be more fully realized in the extended campus environment in the next five years.

Two areas that may not change in the next five years are attitudes toward distant learners and mindsets of librarians trained in a non-electronic environment. Some librarians are not prepared to make the leap of the imagination necessary to harness these powerful interactive technologies in creating new service models that capitalize on the new technology, rather than modifying old service models that merely accomodate it. Again, it is important for library educators to take the lead in preparing the next generation of librarians with the vision and sensitivity needed to help tomorrow's off-campus/distant learners become computer and information literate.

Marie Kascus
Central Connecticut State University
E-mail: kascus@ccsua.ctstateu.edu

Marie A. Kascus is Head of Serials at Central Connecticut State University Library in New Britain, CT. She is recognized internationally for her scholarship and publications in the area of library support for distant learners. She has made presentations at national conferences and published extensively on the topic. Her professional activities include service on many local and national library committees including the Extended Campus Library Services Section of the Association of College & Research Libraries, for which she serves as chair of Research, Nominations, Statistics. Kascus is also a member of ACRL's K.G. Saur Award Committee, member of ALCTS Commercial Technical Services Committee, and chair of its Publications subcommittee. She founded and served as the first president of the Connecticut Chapter of the American Society of Indexers and is currently serving as ASI's voting representative to the National Information Standards Organization (NISO). Other professional activities include member of the Central Michigan University Program Advisory Board for the Sixth Off-Campus Library Services Conference; member of the Advisory Board for the ASIS Thesaurus of Information Science and Librarianship; and member of several NEASC Accreditation Teams. She is a reviewer for Choice magazine, a member of the editorial board for Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, and a referee for The American Journal of Distance Education.