"There must be more!" That was the comment of one undergraduate, studying at a small college many miles from the rich resources of the traditional university library. We heard this, and many similar remarks, during a two-year research study carried out between 1993 and 1995 to explore the experience of students undertaking university courses under franchise arrangements. The report on that study (Goodall 1997) homed in on the key issue for off-campus learners: is their experience in fact comparable, or have the limitations imposed by distance forced them to accept second best?

As we look forward, that question acts as a focus for the provision and management of all library services. Moving into the new millennium, we will find that off-campus study becomes more and more the norm. 1996 was the European Year of Lifelong Learning, and this year two studies have been announced in the UK to explore how libraries can tackle the challenges that new learning paradigms pose (L&IC 1997, JISC 1997). My belief is that the experience of providing off-campus library support now, coupled with the opportunities afforded by electronic services, will offer the model for the future and that few twenty-first century academic libraries will be without off-campus delivery as a key service.

In the UK and in the rest of Europe, we can see signs of this shift in emphasis. The new University of the Highlands & Islands in Scotland, the increasing modularization of courses with opportunities for non-sequential learning, a new concern with building a "Learning Society"¹, and even the experience of telecommunications and Internet Access Providers looking for new markets, all point in the same direction. Learning will take place in chunks throughout life, at the learner's convenience (time, place, style, etc.) and across a variety of providers. One word of warning, however: the proponents of home delivery have got it wrong. Where nothing else is feasible, home-based learning is valuable, but the fact remains that learning is essentially a social activity and so whenever possible, people will want to come together (preferably in small groups) to learn--and no amount of technological wizardry will alter that.

So what will our library of the future look like? First it will be a hybrid library--electronic and traditional services will operate side by side. Delivery will be by the most appropriate means: electronic when it is sensible to use the networks, traditional mail or fax for other services. Librarians (or, as I heard them called recently, "knowledge choreographers") will provide advice, assistance and tutoring, often at a distance over video links, especially where specialists are needed. Libraries will be fully committed to an access philosophy, providing users with the means to connect to remote data services, which will be accessed through intelligent front-end software. More and more such operations will embrace both library and information technology (IT) support through a converged service, and increasingly, they will cooperate with other such services to provide more efficient and effective user support. Perhaps we may even see the long-overdue destruction of barriers between academic and public libraries.

The new librarians will need many of the skills which off-campus librarians have developed: the ability to interpret user requirements without direct face-to-face contact, and the ability to direct users to resources without having shelves of physical objects to browse. But they will need new skills: concepts such as the Dublin core², Z39.50, Java and resource discovery will be as familiar as MARC, AACR and Cutter were to an earlier generation of librarians. Writing web pages in HTML will be as taken for granted as drafting a printed guide to the literature. Network troubleshooting skills will sit alongside familiarity with the structure of Chemical Abstracts. Some of these skills will be specialist territory (as in the past some librarians became cataloguers and others, reader service experts), but awareness and understanding of this whole vast area will be essential. Most important of all, though, are the human skills: enthusiasm, commitment, the ability to communicate clearly, and vision to create the library of the future.

It is a model we have started to implement in the UK, with the launch early in 1997 of the Virtual Academic Library of the North West (VALNOW), located at the University of Central Lancashire, but serving users across the whole of northwest England. Based on a European Commission funded study called Libraries without Walls³ (BIBDEL) (Brophy 1997) VALNOW delivers materials, offers videoconference sessions with subject experts, provides access to remote and local datasets--all through a cooperative network involving librarians from a dozen different institutions. We believe that we have seen the future--and it works!

Notes

¹The Royal Society of Arts' Campaign for Learning, launched in April 1996, stresses the need to create a 'Learning Society' in which every individual participates in learning throughout their lives: the key message of the campaign is that "learning is good for you, for the economy and for society." Details of the Campaign for Learning can be found at http://www.transcend.co.uk/llis/cfl

²Dublin Core is a set of standard, structured elements for describing any networked information resource, a bit like MARC but for whatever appears on the Net. For an explanation of Dublin Core there's a useful article in Program 30, no.4 (October 1996): 345-373 which sets it in the context of other 'metadata' systems. A draft copy of that paper is on the web at http://www.ukoln.ac.uk/metadata/review.html.

³The next Libraries Without Walls conference will be held in September 1997 in Mytilene, Greece.


References

Brophy, P. et al. Access to Campus Library and Information Services by Distant Users: Final Report. University of Central Lancashire, 1997.

Goodall, D. and Brophy, P. A Comparable Experience? Library Support for Franchised Courses in Higher Education (British Library Research & Innovation Report 33). Preston: University of Central Lancashire, 1997.

Library and Information Commission (UK). The role of libraries in a Learning Society. Current Study, University of Warwick, 1997.

UK Joint Information Services Committee (JISC): Committee for Electronic Information. The Electronic Library: Social, Cultural and Economic Perspectives: the Development of the UK Academic Library Services in the Context of Lifelong Learning (Supporting Study). Current Study: University of Central Lancashire: Centre for Research in Library & Information Management, 1997.

Peter Brophy
University of Central Lancashire
E-mail: p.brophy@uclan.ac.uk

Professor Peter Brophy combines the roles of head of an operational library service with that of head of one of the UK's leading research centers in the field of library and information management. The University of Central Lancashire is one of the UK's larger universities, with over 20,000 students, and traces its history back to 1828. Its Library & Learning Resource Services are delivered through a total of nineteen service points in northwest England through the Virtual Academic Library of the North West (VALNOW) which combines traditional delivery with electronic library services. The University's Centre for Research in Library & Information Management (CERLIM), founded in 1993, undertakes a wide variety of research in collaboration with partners throughout the UK and Europe.