Access to Campus Library and Information Services by Distant Users: : Final Report. BIBDEL. Libraries without Walls:

Citation

Marsden, L. (1998), "Access to Campus Library and Information Services by Distant Users: : Final Report. BIBDEL. Libraries without Walls:", Asian Libraries, Vol. 7 No. 12, pp. 435-436. https://doi.org/10.1108/al.1998.7.12.435.1

Several factors are currently combining to make distance education a growth industry worldwide, the most obvious being technological developments such as the Internet. Students studying at a distance need a library service of some kind, whether provided at a site close to them but remote from the parent institution, or delivered from a central location. Information technology is radically changing the way library service can be delivered ‐ long established postal request and delivery mechanisms are being supplemented or replaced by electronic methods. The technology for this already exists, but is not yet being fully exploited, and supporting structures are not yet all in place.

Both the technology and the necessary supporting structures are addressed in this report. It is the last of a series on the BIBDEL Project, funded by the European Commission’s Libraries Programme, a 21 month project to research and demonstrate techniques for providing access and delivery of library materials and services to users based at a distance, conducted between January 1994 and October 1995. It focussed on the use of telematics to see if they can enable distant users to gain the same experiences as users on campus as regards access to a library catalogue, reference and enquiry services and document request and delivery. Experiments were carried out at three institutions, each with different structures (the University of Central Lancashire, Dublin City University and the University of the Aegean).

The three experiments were designed to complement to one another, but all according to the same four principles: to provide distance users with a service as close as possible to that experienced by on‐campus users; that the services should conform to open system standards where possible; that they be cost‐effective; that they be simple to install, maintain and use. The operation and findings of each experiment are explained in brief here; the experiences of both library staff and users are described, including software and hardware problems. Findings highlight the need for training of library users in the use of both OPACs and PCs, as well as the importance of all instructions for off‐campus students being clear. Fuller details of both the experiments and the findings are available in the Project’s second and third reports.

A particularly useful feature of this report is a checklist of issues that anyone planning a similar service needs to consider. In addition, the authors give the URL of a “toolkit” of techniques and advice developed by the BIBDEL team, which is freely available on the Web. A substantial international bibliography, in which 80 per cent of the items cited have been published since 1990, is a valuable source of further references.

This report would give considerable guidance to any library planning a distance library service from scratch, since the emphasis is on using existing technology to devise straightforward, workable systems. Notably, at two of the three institutions involved the experiments were continued as fully operational systems at the end of the project. It should be pointed out that the experiments were on a small scale compared with the very extensive distance library services that have been operating in New Zealand, Australia and South Africa (to name but a few) for many years, but the principles on which the project was based are sound, and could well be applied to larger scale operations.