Readers Respond to the Editor
You raise an excellent question in your Editor's column in the latest
issue of JLSDE. I would also be grateful to see how other institutions
are defining "distance" students, and what policies they have set to
address these varied situations. Your examples are ones that we face,
and will face to a greater degree as time goes on. I would offer
another example that is a variation on what you stated. We have a
number of graduate courses that meet on campus for four to six weekends
our of the entire semester. Naturally, these courses often attract
students from a greater distance, as their need to drive to the
University is reduced. Many of them live several hours away, and while
they are on campus they have very little free time during which the
library is open. Should they be considered distance students?
Since our Digital Library Services unit provides support for ALL remote
users, not just DE students, our only real questions about a students'
status arise when the request is for materials held in our collection.
This is where deciding if some is an on-campus or off-campus student can
get very sticky.
I look forward to reading what others have to offer on this very timely
topic.
Anne Prestamo
Coordinator, Digital Library Services
Edmon Low Library
Oklahoma State University
prestam@okstate.edu
What a relief to see your comment and questioning of who the distance
learners *really* are!
This has been on my mind a lot lately, too.
We are a multi-campus, comprehensive community college serving a
four-county area surrounding metropolitan Denver. We have the largest
distance learning enrollment in Colorado, in addition to trying to provide
outreach library services to two fledgling campuses--with a committee at
work developing a strategic plan for what will most likely be a digital
library.
Yesterday during a library instruction session I asked "How many of you
will be doing your (ENG122) research online at 3 or 4 in the morning?" The
hands shot up all over the room. Here's another emerging group--coming to
campus for classes, but doing some/much/most? of their research from
somewhere else. We've tried to accommodate this demand via web pages,
remote access to FirstSearch and the library catalog, although most of our
electronic sources (Newsbank, Facts on File, InfoTrac [Gen'l Ref Ctr Gold,
Health Academic, SIRS], Books in Print, Reference USA) are licensed for
on-site use only. We have been able to afford remote access to Newsbank
and
SIRS to the two fledgling campuses and have created special web pages for
their use.
Well, I didn't mean to give you an inventory of all our sources, but this
blurring of lines has really got me thinking, too. How can we improve the
delivery of services? Likewise, providing library instruction gets
trickier. I often find myself tap dancing in one regular class session,
trying to essentially teach two different ways to work--inside and outside
the library. I query the students as to which approach they are most
likely
to use. And I'm lucky to work with faculty who for the most part view
library instruction as essential to their classrooms and are more partners
than observers. Additionally, they are beginning to understand the need
for
more time devoted to library instruction, but their own time limitations
haven't changed. "It's me baffled entirely" some days, as my Irish friends
love to say.
Kathleen Cain
Coordinator of Library Instruction
Front Range Community College
(the big, the beautiful, the functional) College Hill Library
Westminster, CO
caink@csn.net
Distributed Education, instead of Distance Education, seems to be the
new lingo for this issue you raised. I think in terms of library
services, the convergence of demands for electronic access to reference
services, context-sensitive-just-in-time help (mini-lessons?) screens,
full text articles, document delivery, electronic reserves access and so
on from both the on campus and off campus student/researcher/faculty
community will cause remote services to become more robust and centrally
understood by all librarians on the campus.
Reference and instruction are areas for concern for all the remote users
... distance education librarians will be resource people for their
colleagues in this area ... more collaboration with faculty to reach
students via the same mode faculty are using will continue to be a
challenge with great potential.
The access to the physical archive will remain the really unique problem
for students who don't come to campus for class and live over
(fill-in-the-blank-for-your-institution) miles from campus. Delivery of
physical materials and ILL materials will be the main piece that will
need special handling.
Jean Caspers
The Valley Library
Oregon State University
jean.caspers@orst.edu
Last year I was given the assignment of creating an
outline/plan/document/you-name-it that would describe what needed to
happen in order to serve our distance students. Right off the bat I ran
smack dab into the situation you describe and this corollary:
The service delivery should not be essentially different for "distance"
and "traditional" students. What we realized quickly was that services
put into place for distance students would be adopted for convenience
sake by all students. The possibilities of entering your own ILL
requests, paying fines, renewing books, getting reference or research
help, accessing reserve articles - all online - would be useful to all
our students.
There are a few services which have to be reserved for truly distance
students, e.g. mailing out books, an expensive service which we can't
provide to students who are on campus at some point each week but happen
to be enrolled in an online course. (It will be interesting indeed to
watch the impact the coming e-book will have on even this need.)
The biggest problem with this situation, as we see it, is how to give
really good research help and instruction without personal contact. We
see the ref interview as an intervention and teaching opportunity. If
students think they can do everything they need to do alone at home
through their computer, we're losing the critical opportunity for that
intervention. Although it will forever remain a mystery why people
perceive hours of frustrating dead-end searching on the Internet more
"convenient" than walking their physical body into a physical library
and getting some help from a human being, that seems to be the case.
However all these needs get ironed out, it is becoming clear that the
distinction between distance students and other students is a misleading
one.
Barbara Kobritz
User & Instructional Services Librarian
Tompkins-Cortland Community College
170 North St. Dryden, NY 13053
kobritb@sunytccc.edu