Week Two Reflection

The following is a reflection on the first two chapters of Sharon Almquist’s Distributed Learning and Virtual Librarianship, especially chapter two which discusses emerging trends in distributed learning and virtual librarianship.  I was especially interested in the discussion of the possibility of embedding librarians into online courses, as I recently completed a related project for my Academic Libraries class.  As a group member, I helped design a proposal for embedding information literacy librarians into online courses delivered via a course management system such as WebCT.  Although feasible, such a project would involve a lot of time to be diverted from librarians’ pre-existing commitments and may not be possible in smaller libraries where librarians are more thinly spread.  Our proposal also relied fairly heavily on the fictional library’s pre-existing information literacy resources and faculty-librarian relationships.  (If anyone is interested in seeing this proposal please let me know.  I tried to find the shared online version but one of my group members has removed it.)

This makes me wonder about libraries’ commitment to distance education.  Would all academic libraries, or public libraries in the same city as academic institutions, be willing to go out of their way to promote and improve their distance education initiatives?  The history of distance education presented by Almquist makes it seem as though distance/distributed/continuing education is a high priority for all libraries, but I am looking forward to doing the library scan assignment to see if this truly is the case. 

While exploring distance education in the Canadian context, I was surprised to see that the CLA Guidelines for Library Support of Distance and Distributed Learning in Canada haven’t been updated since 2000, especially considering vast and rapid changes that have occurred in distance education that have occurred in the last decade.  I feel these changes are better reflected in the ACRL Standards for Distance Learning Library Standards of 2008.  For example, the discussion of possible online facilities seems particularly skimpy in the CLA Guidelines.  Again, this makes me wonder about Canadian libraries' commitment to distance education.