Libraries without Walls 5: The Distributed Delivery of Library and Information Services

Luke Tredinnick (Senior Lecturer in Information Management, London Metropolitan University, UK)

Program: electronic library and information systems

ISSN: 0033-0337

Article publication date: 1 June 2005

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Keywords

Citation

Tredinnick, L. (2005), "Libraries without Walls 5: The Distributed Delivery of Library and Information Services", Program: electronic library and information systems, Vol. 39 No. 2, pp. 175-177. https://doi.org/10.1108/00330330510595797

Publisher

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Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2005, Emerald Group Publishing Limited


Libraries without Walls 5 is the proceedings of the fifth “Libraries without walls” conference, held in Lesvos in Greece, in September 2003. It is a collection of short articles, loosely organised around five key themes: the integration of library services and virtual library environments; the relationship between user needs, information skills and information literacies; usability and accessibility of digital library services; national an institutional perspectives on designing the information environment, and the creation of digital resources by user communities. There are 24 papers, by a mixture of academics and practitioners.

Conferences proceedings will always reflect the vitality and variety of the occasions they represent, and this collection is no exception. The advantage of such collections is that they can provide a series of snapshots that describe current practice. The danger is that those snapshots are so disintegrated and fragmented that they provide no coherent picture, and indeed can act to obscure the true story. To what extent, then, does Libraries without Walls 5 succeed in navigating between these two poles?

The collection opens with the consideration of the blurring between virtual learning environments, and information services. A strongly emergent factor in these five papers is the changing role of the information professional brought about by the increasing provision of digital information services within libraries. In particular, the growing role of information intermediaries is evident, whether through information literacy education or digital information provision, something that also arose through recent consultation with information professionals at London Metropolitan University (Tredinnick, 2004, p. 30).

The second theme in the collection expands on this growing relationship between the information profession and information skills education. Some of this discussion left me with more questions than answers. For example, Sirje Virkus argues that the skills required to find, evaluate, and effectively use information have grown “larger, more complex and more important in the ICT environment” (p. 99), a conclusion that left me thinking well, yes, but… Gill Needham's paper on the MOSAIC course at the Open University provided an interesting demographic profile of the participants. However, the argument that the age profile “corresponds to the average profile of OU students and might support a hypothesis that older students are more likely to be concerned about information literacies than younger ones” left me pondering just how it could do both.

The papers in this second section roused in me concerns that some forms of computer mediated learning for information literacies can act to encourage surface‐learning, something unaddressed directly by any of the authors. For example, Kay Moore reporting on the very interesting and flexible approach taken by the InfoQuest online information skills package at Sheffield Hallam University, a combination of information skills materials and self assessment, reports that “students often skip the text part of the unit and head straight to the activities” (p. 83). The proposed solution to “review the level of activities in relation to text,” (p. 83) circumnavigates a core question about the resource demonstrably encouraging surface learning, with students striving simply to get through the units with the least possible effort. The implication here that less text and more activity will encourage greater involvement in the material seems to me to be the wrong way around – encouraging students to see the learning materials and not the self‐assessment as the point of using the resource would seem a more effective solution, and this may require downplaying the self‐assessment element. More work needs to be done here, but I am in no doubt that the modular approach taken by InfoQuest does offer a valuable model for others to emulate.

These first two parts of the collection are perhaps the most coherent and forceful. Two papers stand out from the other three, which are Oluwatoyin O. Kolowole's on library use by Nigerian professionals and Marie Botha's on information provision in continental Africa and the establishment of the African Digital Library. Both tackle an important issue head‐on, and seek to investigate ways of addressing the digital divide, on the wrong side of which Africa invariably finds itself. Not wishing to contribute to the abundance of well‐meaning sentiment on this topic, I can only point readers to the papers themselves.

After reading through this work I was left not only with acronym fatigue, but also with the impression that countless digital information initiatives have sprung up in isolation around the world with little communication or commonality between them. Doubtless this impression derives in part from the nature of such a collection, and also in part from reading straight through it, as opposed to dipping in and out. However, I began to long for key reference points within this seeming forest of practice. Perhaps this collection, and the conference that informed it, can help in the process of locating and highlighting those reference points, the common assumptions about best practice, and the theory that underlies them – but we are not there yet.

For all that, this remains a strong collection, from which practitioners, academics, and students alike will gain much, most particularly in relation to the academic library sector. However fragmented the collection remains, there is much here that is very interesting indeed, even if hidden amid much that is less so.

References

Tredinnick, L. (2004), “The digital age and the changing profession”, Library and Information Update, Vol. 3 No. 10, p. 30.

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