24th IATUL 2003 Conference "Libraries and education in the networked information environment

Citation

Katsirikou, A. (2003), "24th IATUL 2003 Conference "Libraries and education in the networked information environment", Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 20 No. 8. https://doi.org/10.1108/lhtn.2003.23920hac.001

24th IATUL 2003 Conference "Libraries and education in the networked information environment"

Anthi Katsirikou

The Conference took place on a university campus at Middle East Technical University Library in Ankara, Turkey from 1-5 June 2003. The Library Web site at www.lib.metu.edu.tr captures the innovation and developments described by Bulent Karasozen, Director of Libraries, in the March 2003 issue of Library Hi Tech News, Vol. 20 No. 3. It was indeed a marvelous place. Attendees enjoyed the environment, the organization, the presentations and the social events too. The presentations could be divided into three categories: those that described the state-of-the-art in libraries, those that announced some new projects and ideas of advancement, and those that were more theoretical-based supporting the Conference theme.

The state-of-the-art

Emel Sokullu referred to the Electronic Services of the Sabanci University Information Center. The following digital collection applications have been planned and are in operation in the IC: E-journal, E-book, E-thesis, E-lit, E-Reserve, Video recordings, Sound recordings, Digital Album of University Construction Photos, Slide Collection, Newspaper Clippings of University History Collection and Table of Contents of Books. The common features of these applications are:

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  All these collections are accessible through the OPAC and additional search functions.

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  The issue of "Copyright" is given priority and taken into consideration at all times.

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  Off-campus access to all of the digital collections is provided to all Sabanci University personnel and students.

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  Announcements are made when new digital collections are organized and opened to use.

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  All these collections are introduced to users through orientation and continuous education programs.

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  The development of the Digital Collections is reconsidered and revised in accordance with user demands and recommendations.

Periodicals are divided into four groups: Print Only, Electronic Only, Print & Electronic, and Aggregator Database Holdings. The first three of these are catalogued and classified and they are accessible through OPAC.

A database has been created and developed to cover Sabanci University preprints, lecture notes, and research papers. Items to be included in this database are sent by faculty members. This function allows users to search by author, title, keyword, and subject heading. Users can also find the full list of E-literature and list of articles by faculties and type of activities, such as preprint, lecture notes and research papers. The aim of E-Reserve is to organize a collection to support the educational programs of the University. The faculty members select items of the E-Reserve collection and the use of the application is limited to students. The full text version is password-protected.

Since the Sabanci University Campus is located outside the city and most of the students are resident on campus, a large video and audio collection has been developed and made available on the OPAC.

The project "Table of Contents of Books" supports the bibliographic content of some materials such as conference proceedings and edited books. Currently, the tables of contents of items previously selected by the reference librarians are processed and made accessible through the OPAC. The gradual increase in both digital information and collections has brought the need for user services on a virtual platform. Consequently, Sabanci University Information Center has created the above-mentioned digital collections and several projects related to these: MyIC, E-Reference, Virtual Tour, Facts and Figures, Scout Project and E-Questionnaire. The rapid increase in the number of electronic information resources not only enhances technology but also provides remote access to IC services. In accordance, the E-reference service is designed to reply to questions of users simultaneously on an electronic platform. Studies show that it has been easier for many users to ask the questions on an electronic platform than face-to-face.

Hale Yumsak and Emre Hasan Akbayrak presented the METU Library conference host, and a Pilot Institution in the e-based Budgeting Project. The mission of the library is developed from the essential mission of METU, which aims to carry out education, research, and public service activities at the universal standard level. With this mission, the METU Library strives to reveal that in order to develop our society and humanity socially, culturally, economically, scientifically, and technologically, obtaining, producing, practicing, spreading knowledge and educating individuals with this knowledge are necessary. The vision of the library is based on the needs of the education and research programs of METU. The Library aims to provide knowledge for its users through adopting contemporary computer and network technologies in a rapid and economical way. It aims to be a modern information and document center, which presents knowledge free from time and space, which is based on professional mutual support and cooperation and catches up with the developments in this area with the help of its staff. Since August 24, 2001, the METU Library has been one of the six selected pilot institutions of "The Performance-based Budgeting Project". The goal: the METU Library aims to increase user satisfaction through providing service in accordance with modern library standards.

The strategies for technology are:

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  To establish the necessary informatics support and technical structure in order to sustain e-library collection and provide service to users in the electronic media.

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  To observe and adapt the innovations and developing technologies in the library management.

The strategies for human resources are:

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  To make searches for allocation and staff in order to employ temporary and permanent personnel according to human resources plans.

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  To prepare and practice educational, development and consulting programs according to the requirements of human resources.

The strategies for improving organization and management are:

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  To form a "commission of strategic planning".

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  To form a "commission of observation and evaluation of performance".

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  To obtain a consulting service in the field of improving organization and evaluation.

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  To form a unit of "observation of environment".

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  To form a unit of "adequacy and comparison" in the fields of collection, user service, human resources, technology, and physical resources.

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  To form a unit of "quality assurance".

Tuba Akbaytürk from Koc University in Istanbul spoke about "The impact of consortial purchasing on library acquisitions: the Turkish experience." Despite 20 years of experience in cooperation in Turkey in terms of document delivery services, any consortial access to electronic resources had not been gained until late 1998 when the Anatolian University Libraries Consortium (ANKOS) was created.

Libraries rely highly on faculty members' suggestions and try to respond to their research needs primarily. On the other hand, ANKOS has a significant impact on the product selection of its members. This impact is beyond the staff recommendations and more conventional methods just like vendors' visits to the libraries and vendor stands opened at conferences.

ANKOS, although it has initially found acceptance as an entity, which brings the purchasing power of many institutions together, made a jump-start with supporting its members in easing the communication with foreign vendors, in evaluating license agreements, in analyzing usage statistics, in providing user training, etc. Further research is needed to investigate these points in more detail using a focus group technique, which will provide a more interactive environment and chance of instant follow-up. Additional areas in which ANKOS may assist its members can be also identified in the course of these focus group sessions as a result of this research. Once such areas are identified, programs better geared to remedy the gaps can be designed using the expertise available from its various members.

New projects

Maria Heijne from Delft University of Technology in The Netherlands, presented the paper "DARE to keep e-material ready for the future!" As a result of the rapid development of ICT (information and communications technology), the world of the provision of academic information has undergone radical change in recent years. Besides the traditional channels – academic associations, conferences, and journals – a virtual world has come into being in which a large part of the exchange of academic information takes place. This is being done in new forms, and the division of roles between the parties involved is also changing.

Academic (scientific) output is, in this context, defined as written results of scientific research, generally in the form of text. The core of scientific output consists of journal articles and books written by scientists and published by commercial publishers, who (sometimes) pay royalties to the scientist for their copyright. These publications derive their quality and status for a large part from a peer review process, performed by colleagues in the academic environment. Publishers sell the publications to the public at large and to (academic) libraries. Libraries make the publications available to their circle of clients, consisting mostly of students and scientists who have an interest in the work of their peers. Universities use the number and the quality of publications as a measure of quality of individual scientists and of the university as a whole. Some universities construct collections of scientific documents (repositories) and grant access to service providers, to "harvest" (selectively collect) information about scientific documents, for the purpose of constructing discipline-specific indexes and data collections.

SPARC provides a good framework for the wants, needs and incentives of the various parties involved in a coalition to develop (a network of) digital repositories. Delft University started the project Roquade, in collaboration with Utrecht University. The boards of the Dutch universities recently decided to combine their efforts in a single new initiative, the establishment of a digital platform for academic information: Digital Academic Repositories (DARE). The joint approach is yielding significant benefits such as standardisation, national exchange and linking of files, the bringing together of scarce expertise, and cost-efficiencies. As a result of the integrated approach, aspects such as long-term preservation and co-ordination with digital learning environments are also being taken into account.

The aim of the DARE project is to modernize the facilities for Dutch scientific information by realizing an infrastructure and services to store, preserve, provide access to and distribute the scientific output of The Netherlands. DARE provides a distributed network of "institutional repositories". An institutional repository is a facility, consisting of hardware, software, data and procedures, that:

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  Contains digital objects representing all scientific output such as working papers/pre-prints, theses, research reports, data sets, conference contributions, multimedia presentations, etc. from one or more universities, research organizations and scientific institutes.

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  Insures adequate identification of the digital objects by means of metadata and a unique digital identifier.

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  Provides facilities for management functions and archival of digital objects to a repository manager, representing the management of the university(ies) and academic staff.

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  Provides easy and standardized access to digital objects and metadata to approved scientists and service providers, thus enhancing visibility and interoperability.

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  Provides adequate security for digital objects and metadata.

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  Delivers digital objects and metadata to the National Library, for preservation in the national digital depot.

How does it work? The producer supplies data to the archive, and different kinds of metadata are added: descriptive metadata (title, author, year etc.) and metadata for sustainability (who is the owner, check-sums, the quality and size of the original, criteria for selection). The maintainer of the archive forms all these data into an archival-information-package (aip), a file that contains all data. This is the basis of the XML container.

All containers are stored in the digital archive and the archive system is indexed via a catalogue. The user looks up a document in the index and the aip-container with the data and metadata and the connected container with the viewer both are retrieved. The viewer starts up at the server of the archive and the result (also called dip = dissemination information package) is presented to the user in the format required by the user. The programs that can provide the proper representation (PDF, Word html) are installed at servers of the library. The user himself does not have to bother about these.

The project has supplied several conclusions, in four dimensions:

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   (1) The organisational dimension: i.e. (inter) national co-operation and standardisation.

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   (2) The production dimension: implementing an organisational and technical infrastructure for the digital archive.

3. 3.

   (3) Technology dimension: further research on preservation strategies and their implementation.

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   (4) The business dimension: designing business models for the exploitation and economical viability of a digital archive.

Roser Gómez, Marta López and Anna Rovira from the Universitat Politecnica de Catalunya (UPC) in Barcelona describe a new type of library for the New European Space for Education. In the present framework of the new European higher education context development, we face a new model of library that should give answers to the future university needs: the library should become a strategic university service that helps students all through their learning process. Libraries should promote access, management and handling of the outstanding information for the university, business and society as a whole.

The European university scene in 2010 will be based on a higher education global market. Teaching will not be the centre of the pedagogical model anymore – it will move to a new conducted learning process: the educational environment will become more virtual and the higher students will manage their own educational project, learning, above all, from case resolution.

Library services supporting learning and research within the universities will need to be readjusted: new and high-quality specialised information products will appear. Even if digital libraries are to be the long-term future, librarians should manage the hybrid library in the next decades. Librarians will have new roles and will need to develop new professional skills and personal attitudes. Some key factors will be daily use of technology-teaching skills, teaching support and subject knowledge. Librarians will not be guardians anymore but key advisers.

Rebiun is the Spanish Network of University Libraries, represented by the heads of the university libraries of Spain. Rebiun's new three-year strategic plan, 2003-2006, is divided into five areas of activity: the university library model, information technologies, electronic information resources, staff training, and the organisation and administration of Rebiun. The first strategic area involves the implementation of guidelines for building a new model for university libraries, which are conceived of as being an active and essential part of learning and research resource centres such as the Centre de Recursos per a l'aprenentatge (CRAI).

This new Centre is intended to integrate university services related to information, documentation and ICT (information and communication technologies), in a unique integrated environment, where users could find corporate information, scientific information, both individual and collective study areas, and access to networked multimedia products.

The following examples demonstrate how UPC's University Library has begun to implement the new library model by unifying the University's information, information management and information and communication technology services in a single multifunctional space:

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  Tailor-made Bibliotècnica is a project that aims to tailor the content of Bibliotècnica to the particular interests of University members. It is a UPC digital library platform that allows user groups and individual users to customize its content. It was designed to facilitate personalised access to services and to the information held in document collections.

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  The lecturer's mailbox: the digital library by subjects is a University Library project to classify the documents available at Bibliotècnica based on the needs of the first- and second-cycle subjects taught at the University. The aim of this restricted-access intranet is to design an archive of teaching materials that will be accessible to all members of the University. It will contain resources created by librarians, previously available documents recommended by lecturers and documents created by the Library to aid teaching. Students will be able to access lists of resources for specific subjects.

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  The electronic teaching resources areas. These areas are equipped with hardware and software and are aimed at those members of the University who create teaching materials. They are designed to facilitate access to tools used to improve processes of teaching innovation, the implementation of new teaching methodologies for semi-distance and distance learning, and the training of lecturers in the use of electronic tools for access to and manipulation of digital information and documentation. Users of these areas can create materials in HTML format, digitise documents and images, edit videos in digital format, edit documents in multimedia formats and publish documents on the University's intranets.

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  The self-learning areas and the virtual language laboratory. The UPC Library's strategic plan introduced what is one of the most current concepts in University planning on to the scene: the transformation of the teaching process into a process of self-learning. Its aim was to create self-learning areas where one could "learn to learn", and self-training areas that would offer multimedia materials for students to learn foreign languages, office automation and management skills, at which one could also learn to use the Internet and other information resources.

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  The virtual language laboratory is designed to complement the self-learning of languages – English in particular, but also Catalan, Spanish, French and German. More hardware and self-learning software, which had previously only been installed locally at libraries' self-learning areas, have been made available on the networks.

Selenay Aytac from ISIK University Library in Istanbul discussed the Development of a user-centered digital library for Ottoman manuscripts. The storage of digitised documents in the open Internet environment is an important mechanism for allowing valuable and rare documents to be accessed easily by a large number of geographically distributed users. This is especially true of Ottoman manuscripts at present. A very large number of these represent the historical records of some 700 years of Ottoman history. They often include many unique and beautiful bindings, gilded and miniature illuminations relating to laws in the Ottoman period, Ottoman foreign policy, the sciences and medicine, literature and culture among others. The manuscripts also display a number of calligraphic styles. Written in Ottoman Turkish, Arabic and Farsi, they form an invaluable archive demonstrating the multilingual and multicultural diversity of this period.

Digital libraries cater for the critical importance of time and facilitate the satisfaction of the user's need in real time. Digital library collections are not limited to document surrogates: they extend to digital artifacts that cannot be represented or distributed in printed formats. Access is the primary benefit that will accrue from the development of a digital library of Ottoman manuscripts that could be shared by a variety of users. These users will include not only researchers and experts in Ottoman history, but also individuals with general and aesthetic interests in the physical objects themselves. A digital library for Ottoman manuscripts would contribute to the improvement of studies in Ottoman history, literature and linguistics, that are important for cultural and genealogical studies. Ensuring the longevity of the Ottoman cultural heritage has, hence, become a new dimension.

An effective digital library initiative in this area should be based on the expectations of the multicultural and multilingual users of Ottoman manuscripts. The Digital library should adhere to strict quality control principles, including enhanced availability and reliability, better security, and more diversified user-centered services. These imperatives make the creation and maintenance of a digital library service more complex than a classical library system. Strict quality control measures need to be applied to achieve them. To develop a user-centered digital library for Ottoman manuscripts, one must focus on user expectations and needs in order to work backwards towards the creation of a viable user interface.

Information systems researchers have attempted to define some dimensions of Web quality such as specific content, content quality, appearance and technical adequacy. We would like to focus on the multicultural dimensions of Web quality which were covered by the Information system researchers for user-centered digital libraries of Ottoman manuscripts in this study.

The user interface is the most important component of a successful digital library. User interfaces have to be improved and designed according to the needs of user requirements. Additionally, the needs of the same user can also change over time. This means that a digital library for Ottoman manuscripts should continuously focus on user expectations and needs. The core issue in developing multicultural Web sites is ultimately cross-cultural communication. The World Wide Web now affords communication possibilities above and beyond geographical boundaries and has itself erected walls between communities. Multiculturally developed Web interfaces will undoubtedly aid cross cultural communication on the Web. Therefore, in the case of Ottoman manuscripts digital library interfaces should be developed multiculturally.

The development of a user-centered digital library for Ottoman manuscripts would provide significant insurance against the loss of these valuable materials, in addition to providing access to its contents for its multicultural users. Developing a multilingual and multicultural interface in a digital library for Ottoman manuscripts should enhance user satisfaction. It would also provide personal disk space for its users to record or store information they have collected or favourite links to sections of the digital library collections. It should also structure interactions with the user such as discussion lists or annotation platforms that provide them with the opportunity of participating in a wider user community.

Ian H. Witten promoted the "The Greenstone digital library software" developed as part of the New Zealand Digital Library Project. Digital libraries are large, organized, focused collections of information. The Greenstone software is intended to help people design and build such collections quickly and easily. Collections may be large – some comprise Gbytes of text; others include many millions of short documents. Additionally, far larger volumes of information may be associated with a collection – typically audio, image, and video.

Greenstone is international and multilingual: it is widely used in many different countries; interfaces and collections exist in many of the world's languages; and it is being distributed by Unesco as part of the "Information for All" program. It is multiplatform: it runs on all Windows, Unix, and Macintosh OS/X systems. Users access collections over the Web, or from self-contained, self-installing CD-ROMs. A basic Greenstone collection of new material with a standard look and feel can be set up in just a few minutes (this operation is followed by the mechanical process of building the collection, which may take from a few moments for a tiny collection to several hours for a multi-Gbyte one; perhaps a day, if it involves many different full-text indexes). However, digital library collections may be customized in a wide variety of different ways, and some collections, particularly large ones, have their own idiosyncratic requirements. The design and debugging process for sophisticated collections can take days – longer, if iterative redesign guided by usability testing is involved. Of course, as the number of collections grows and the variety of styles increases, it becomes more likely that some existing collection will match new requirements. With Greenstone, it is easy to reuse a collection design.

The facilities that a collection provides, and the user interface for searching and browsing, are highly customizable at many different levels. Users can easily specify what document formats will be included (e.g. HTML, Word, PDF, PostScript, PowerPoint, Excel); from where already-available metadata (if any) comes (for example, XML files, OAI archives, Latex bibliographies); what searchable indexes will be provided (e.g. full text, perhaps differentiated by language, and certain metadata such as titles); and what browsing structures will be available (e.g. list of authors, titles, classification hierarchy).

Digital libraries have the advantage over other interactive systems that their user interfaces are universally based on metadata. Metadata are the glue that allows new documents to be added and immediately become first-class citizens of the library. It is the key to providing searching and browsing facilities. Greenstone incorporates a range of mechanisms at different levels to capitalize on this. With Greenstone, users design their collections individually – typically by taking an existing collection that closely matches their needs and adapting its structure as necessary. The resulting design is recorded in a short file called the "collection configuration file." It specifies such things as the collection's title, the creator's e-mail address, a description of the purpose and principles governing what is included, what input file types should be included in the collection, where the metadata come from and what form they take, and how the collection will look to the user. Searching the full text of all documents in the collection is a basic facility, included by default in all collections. Collection designers can determine whether searching should be on a paragraph, section, and/or whole-document level (this affects the scope of matches to a given query). They can also ask for full-text indexes to be built on metadata items (e.g. titles, authors). They can split the collection into sub-collections that can each be searched individually, or use language metadata to restrict searches by language.

Greenstone is designed on the philosophy that simple things should be simple, while complex things should be possible. Several advanced facilities are included that can be incorporated into a collection by a small addition to its configuration file. One challenge with a rich system like Greenstone is the need for good, up to date documentation. In fact, from a user's point of view the chief bottle-neck when customizing collections is documentation, not the facilities that are provided.

Gulcin Cribb and Chris Hogan at Bond University in Australia delivered "Balanced Scorecard: linking strategic planning to measurement and communication" and discussed the strategies in implementing a Balanced Scorecard (BSC) approach to facilitate strategic planning. Libraries in common with many other organizations have been developing performance management systems that not only measure the "right" things, but also enable effective communication to external and internal stakeholders. Bond University's BSC aims to achieve three broad outcomes:

1. 1.

   (1) To enable the measurement of all critical activities.

2. 2.

   (2) To provide a strategic management system to monitor the implementation of the strategic plan.

3. 3.

   (3) To facilitate communication with all stakeholders, in particular with staff.

In developing the Library's BSC, each manager had access to key internal documents, which specify the University's and the Library's vision, mission and strategies, and performance. A considerable range of data and previous surveys and information available from various library organizations were also utilized. The final scorecard includes a description of each of the four perspectives along with the corresponding objectives, measures and targets. Aspects of the management system, which are not shown, include the detailed initiatives to be undertaken, the assignment of responsibilities and timelines.

The customer perspective. The University has identified customer satisfaction, provision of "value added" educational services, superior employment outcomes for graduates and improved relationships with parents, employers, alumni and other stakeholders as its objectives for this perspective. The objectives focus on ensuring customer satisfaction with resources, services and facilities; effective communication and collaboration with the academic staff; and ensuring customer awareness of the quality, relevance and appropriateness of information resources provided.

Internal business process perspective. The University's internal business perspective lists improved efficiency and asset utilization, new academic initiatives, growing return on investment and continuous improvement of quality and service as its objectives. In aligning the Library's scorecard to these objectives for the internal business perspective the Library must endeavour: to achieve continuous improvement of services, facilities and resources; to improve availability of course materials and to ensure cost-effective planning and implementation of information skills programs.

Innovation and learning perspective. This perspective focuses on the organization's ability to continue to improve and create value for its stakeholders. The University's objectives for this perspective include objectives engaging quality academics and staff with international experience, increasing resources for all aspects of teaching and research and establishing and developing new technologies.

Financial perspective. The University's objectives for the financial perspective are "profitable growth" and return on investment. In alignment with this objective, the main focus of the financial perspective for the Library is to ensure that resources are allocated cost-effectively in order to achieve low costs per transaction, per product, per service and so on.

Each project or initiative has an objective, owner, timelines, performance indicators, resource requirements and priority rating. Information is updated on the Library's intranet on an ongoing basis to ensure that owners of all projects communicate their progress to all staff. A key success factor is the involvement of staff in the process of building the scorecard. The approach ensures that the BSC is understood and agreed by all staff, so that their day-to day activities are aligned both with the Library's and with the University's strategic objectives.

Theoretical presentations

Alan Bundy's paper, "Changing the paradigm: libraries, education and networking", suggests that the most enduring and flexible learning institution is the library, organized for well over two millennia to provide self-paced and self-selected transmission of knowledge. Axiomatically, therefore, libraries and librarians should be proactive participants in the evolution of the twenty-first century educational program. The University of South Australia is grappling with a fundamental pedagogical issue faced by many universities. With strong support from its library it has, since 1995, led Australia in identifying seven graduate qualities within its quality assurance and improvement process. These are, that a graduate of the University:

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  Operates effectively with and upon a body of knowledge of sufficient depth to begin professional practice.

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  Is prepared for lifelong learning in pursuit of personal development and excellence in professional practice.

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  Is an effective problem solver, capable of applying logical, critical and creative thinking to a range of problems.

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  Can work both autonomously and collaboratively as a professional.

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  Is committed to ethical action and social responsibility as a professional and a citizen.

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  Communicates effectively in professional practice and as a member of the community.

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  Demonstrates an international perspective as a professional and as a citizen.

The University Library's main direct contribution to the achievement of those qualities has been its leadership, institutionally and nationally, in promoting the importance of developing information-literate students through the curriculum and pedagogy. There are two fundamental reasons why information literacy needs to be owned by the total educational community. The first is lifelong learning. The second is the rapid obsolescence of much content in professional first-degree programs, making knowledge of how to learn, and how to find, evaluate and apply new information so much more important. The reality is that much of the content in such degrees has a use-by date of ten years. They focus on answers, which continually change, rather than on questions, which rarely change.

Libraries and librarians are very effective networkers, at the local, national and international levels. That sense of the common good through cooperation is a rare primary strength and value of librarianship, which is not publicized well enough beyond the profession, although the Australian Library and Information Association's March 2002 core values statement, and especially its seventh value about partnerships, provides a starting-point. Clearly librarians need to partner with teachers in developing information-literate students and in helping those teachers grapple with the increasing information complexities of their own discipline. They also need to engage more with general and specialist educational associations, conferences and publications. Like all professionals, librarians tend to focus within their own professional silo. Yet, of all the professions, librarianship has the most to offer every other profession. Librarianship should be the empowering partner to all professions in the age of information and knowledge.

Sohair F. Wastawy and Christopher Stewart from the Illinois Institute of Technology addressed "Learning communities: a fundamental shift in the learning process, an investigative study into their impact on library services". Over the last few decades, higher education has become more process-oriented and less product oriented, focusing on active, collaborative learning. This change is being driven in part by the employers who hire our graduates and in part by the students themselves. Today's employers are looking for more than just technical competency in college graduates. Increasingly employers are looking for skills in communications, teamwork, and leadership.

At IIT the authors have observed many students working collaboratively in groups both at the Galvin Library and at other locations on campus. Most of these groups are small – not more than five or six students – and they typically cluster around one or more computers, either University-supplied workstations or the students' own laptops. The authors have also observed that the traditional forms of library instruction currently being offered at IIT are not achieving their desired results. During the mandatory sessions, students, particularly undergraduates, are often seen surfing the Web or e-mailing friends. Later, when they get an assignment that requires library research, they do not know where to start. Libraries and librarians, who are considered to be "non-technical" and thus unknowledgeable, are seldom if ever used by engineers. This cultural bias on the part of engineers may reflect the guild heritage of engineering. Prior to the early twentieth century, a college education was not a requirement for becoming an engineer. Rather, new engineers learned the trade through an apprenticeship with an experienced engineer.

A number of roles are assumed by group members during information-seeking activities. These roles operate in several contexts, as described in group theory, namely the context of the group, the context of the activity (information seeking), and the individuals' organizational context outside the group. These roles are information gatherer, information referrer, information verifier, information instigator and indexer/abstractor. This study identified the following types of collaboration taking place in the library:

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  Joint search, where a small group of students gathers around a single computer terminal or book to discuss ideas and plan the best course of action. These types of groups are most often engaging in group problem solving.

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  Coordinated search, where a small group will work at two or more terminals, sharing and comparing results. It can sometimes appear that group members are competing to find information.

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  Free query, where individuals working near one another will lean over and ask the person next to them for help. These are usually the types of questions that should be asked of library staff, but students often ask other, because it is more convenient than going to the reference desk and because the other person can see the "context of the questioner's state of work".

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  Directed query, where individuals working next to one another watch what their neighbors are doing, especially at the library's computer terminals. This results in users either copying the actions of one another to get the desired results or asking one another how they did something.

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  Chance encounter, where "patterns of work intersect at a communal resource."

The study shows that, although students are using these new resources, they are often frustrated by their inability to find relevant information and they lack the skills needed to effectively evaluate the information they retrieve. If libraries can properly identify their role in the students' learning process and environment, they can add to the students' satisfaction and help them develop the ability to navigate the information world through a number of means.

Hans Roes from Tilburg University in The Netherlands addressed, "E-learning and libraries: trends and opportunities." Undoubtedly, there are profound changes going on in the educational system. These changes are needed because of ever-growing pressure in the school systems themselves, partly because society itself is changing into one in which knowledge work becomes ever more important, and partly because of the very information and communication technologies which are transforming our economies. Both of these factors evoke change and offer a solution to the problems with which the educational system struggles.

The main issue, of course, is whether more active learning styles will become the norm, since many of today's courses are of a rather "self-contained" nature in which educators present students with texts through which to work in a linear way and assessment is too often based on whether or not a student is able to reproduce the texts prescribed by the teacher.

Digital portfolios are new tools for student assessment and they are more than that as well. Initially, digital portfolios were developed as an alternative way of assessing student progress, with more emphasis on the learning process and the material results a student achieves throughout a course of study. By taking a knowledge management approach to digital portfolios, these results can be shared over the Internet or, more likely, the intranet. This implies a new task for the library in the management and indexing of these student portfolios in such a way that they too can be integrated with other information resources offered by the library. In this sense, digital portfolios are an extension of the first domain identified – digital libraries and digital learning environments – but now include the intranet. The emphasis here is on the institution as a knowledge organization, and the integration of that knowledge with other information resources.

There are many definitions of information literacy, but they all share an emphasis on personal competencies, which are usually broken down by the chain: recognition of an information need, development of a search strategy – query formulation and selection of sources, evaluation, synthesis, and effective use of the new information. Of course, librarians who are building expertise in developing Web-based course material can also use this. Experts in developing course material, programmers, graphical designers, and experts in assessment, all will work together in designing rich modularized learning environments that offer alternative learning routes to different types of students. However, many learning environments build on a model for which origins can be traced back to early distance education. In this model, students are given a "box" containing all the material for a course they need to master, so-called self-contained courses.

Again, if more active learning styles become the norm, then one can foresee a role for librarians in the multi-disciplinary teams developing learning environments such as those mentioned above. Librarians can add links to the resources – print and electronic – available in their collections and on the Web. They can explain how information resources in a particular subject field are organized and how students can find their way in subject areas that are relatively new to them. A nice example of this approach is the module DEsite <http://cwis.kub.nl/~dbi/instruct/eu/> developed at Tilburg University to explain the complexities of the decision-making process in Europe. The module was developed in close cooperation between legal scholars and library staff. Lawyers explain the technical and legal aspects of the decision-making process, and library staff show how to trace the many documents produced in this process in the jungle of European Union databases and Web sites. Together they have built a learning environment that individually they could not have produced easily. The DEsite model shows the synergy that is possible, and the result is a rich learning environment for students and an electronic reference tool for lawyers active in this field.

On a larger scale, there could be organizational consequences. In much in the same way, with or without an institutional strategy, it is still a librarian's task to support teaching and learning, and to develop relationships with faculty further and in the direction of supporting their teaching. Librarians should talk with students and find out in which ways librarians can best accommodate student learning. Librarians can start small and develop ideas and projects in close cooperation with their patrons. Looking at examples of colleagues at other institutions to find out what works and what does not – and why – is a good place to begin. Librarians have, and can develop further, unique skills to support educational innovation and they have the opportunity to act as role models within their institutions. After all, library work is knowledge work.

David C. Prosser, Director of SPARC Europe, based in the UK, explored "The next information revolution – can institutional repositories and self-archiving transform scholarly communications?" The rise of institutional repositories and the open access model gives libraries and researchers their first chance to change fundamentally the way that scientific information is communicated. By looking closely at the functions performed by scholarly journals we can determine how new technology and models can better serve the international research community.

The term "institutional repositories" has been used to describe digital collections capturing and preserving the intellectual output of a single or multi-university community. They may contain a wide range of materials that reflect the intellectual wealth of an institution – for example, preprints and working papers, published articles, enduring teaching materials, student theses, data-sets, etc. The repositories would be cumulative and perpetual, ensuring ongoing access to material within them. They should be built to common international technical standards to ensure that the materials can be searched and retrieved and they should be available freely over the Internet.

There are many benefits, at many levels provided by institutional repositories: for the individual:

1. 1.

   Provide a central archive of their work.

2. 2.

   Increase the dissemination and impact of their research.

3. 3.

   Act as a full CV.

For the institution:

1. 1.

   Increase visibility and prestige.

2. 2.

   Act as an advertisement to funding sources, potential new faculty and students, etc.

For society:

1. 1.

   Provide access to the world's research.

2. 2.

   Ensure long-term preservation of institutes' academic output.

3. 3.

   Can accommodate increased volume of research output (no page limits, can accept large data-sets, "null-results", etc.)

Institutional repositories

Three, open source software packages exist for setting up and implementing institutional repositories. Almost 100 institutions world-wide have set up repositories using this software. In addition, there are at least two major national projects investigating how to set up national infrastructures for institutional repositories – SHERPA in the UK, and DARE in The Netherlands.

Open access journals

The number of open access journal's publishing high quality, peer-reviewed research is growing. SPARC and SPARC Europe are in partnership with a number of these journals, in particular, BioMedCentral, who have now published over 2,000 papers in 80 open access journals. New open access initiatives are regularly being announced, including the recent decision of the Indian Academy of Sciences to make their 11 journals open access and the Public Library of Science decision to launch two high-quality open access journals in biology and medicine.

Over the next few years all players in the communication process can play a part in making change happen. In particular, authors can:

• •

  Support open access journals by submitting papers to them and refereeing, reading, and citing articles in them.

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  Launch new open access journals if appropriate.

• •

  Discuss open access and reasonable prices with the publishers of the journals they use regularly (especially if they are editors or board members).

• •

  Discuss with funding bodies funding and promotion criteria – ensuring that faculty are not penalized for publishing in open access journals (especially those that are online only).

• •

  Deposit their work in institutional repositories.

Librarians can:

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  Establish institutional repositories.

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  Help faculty archive their research papers (new and old) within the repository, digitizing older papers if necessary.

• •

  Help open access journals launched at their institutions to become known to other libraries, indexing services, potential funders, and potential readers.

• •

  Make sure scholars at their institutions know how to find open access journals and archives in their fields and set up tools to allow them to access them.

• •

  As open access journals proliferate, and as their usage and impact grow, cancel over-priced journals that do not measure up.

• •

  Familiarize themselves with the issues.

• •

  Support SPARC Europe to multiply their effort.

Alex Byrne's paper, "Digital libraries: barriers or gateways to scholarly communication?" about the unprecedented desktop access to scholarly information, has been made possible by the introduction of digital libraries. The powerful combination of digital publications, specialist and generalist databases, sophisticated search systems and portals enables scholars and students to rapidly examine a great variety of the literature in their own disciplines and those new to them. Access is available globally 24 hours a day without geographical limitation.

This contradiction between the technical possibilities and the economic, educational and infrastructural limitations poses many challenges for libraries and especially technological university libraries. How can we ensure that our faculty and students will have the access they need to the world's scientific, technological and other literature? How can we help them develop the skills to use that literature effectively? In answering these and other questions, libraries help advance the development of their societies and economies.

Anthi Katsirikou and Professor George Bokos from the Technical University of Crete presented a paper on the virtual organization in libraries, which will be a necessity of the future. Virtual organization is a new way of work and work-flow organization between organizations or between departments within an organization. A VO can be described as follows: the essence of virtual organization is the management of goal-oriented activity in a way that is independent of the means for its realization. This implies a logical separation between the conception and planning of an activity, on the one hand, and its implementation, on the other. By activity we mean anything undertaken in an organization, be it production, marketing, distribution, R&D, or any other domain. It is important to keep in mind that the separation between conception and implementation is categorical, in the sense that conception deals with an abstract model of an activity and is not materially dependent upon any particular outcome. However, this categorical distinction does not imply a master-slave relationship: that is, implementation may also require abstract modeling for its own purposes. The principles, the tools and the type of organization, could be applied to library organization as well as to libraries' cooperation and coordination. These fields are organizational synergies between libraries, consortia, scholarly communication, benchmarking etc. In the definition above we can clearly recognize libraries, when they involve shared collections and interlibrary loan systems, when they join their forces to achieve collectively lower subscription prices and online access, when they share records and metadata, when they jointly organize e-learning courses and continuing education programs. Between the virtual organization characteristics are some, which are relevant to libraries' cooperation, such as: based on core competencies, network of independent organizations, one identity, based on information technology, no hierarchy, distinction between a strategical and operational level, small-sized partners, vague/fluid boundaries, shared ownership, shared leadership, geographically dispersed, based on trust, no organizational chart and meta-organization, customer-based and mass-customization.

For the modern librarian to be able to participate in and to develop this kind of virtual space for information handling and management specific skills are required and these skills should be incorporated into the syllabuses of the respective educational institutions.

Librarians, being an integral part of the organizational team, are a part of the solution, not of the problem. So, librarians must be risky and inventive to realize their role and decisive in action. They have also to visualize the future and jeopardize transferring their visions into practice.

There is already a shortage of supply, a lack of people with the right combination of skills. The new roles for information and knowledge workers require people with ambition and drive, with management understanding and insight, with readiness for change and innovation, with in-depth knowledge of IT applications and developments, as well as the more traditional skills of information management. This is the shift that the LIS syllabus must perform in order to be prepared to face the present and future demands of libraries and information centers. Theoretical infrastructure and practical training are the combination of methods, which bring it to a successful outcome, either for the tacit or for the explicit knowledge and culture they need as professionals.

Anthi Katsirikou (anthi@library.tuc.gr) is the Library Director at the Technical University of Crete, Chania, Crete, Greece.