The Italian students have really appreciated and exploited the services offered by the library of Northumbria University, both for printed an electronic resources. Their technological infrastructure let the distant learning students feel like being really close to the library and the learning resources. The system of passwords and accounts, even if it is well-explained and assisted, still gives some difficulties. Further integration, to reduce the number of steps to obtain identification to electronic environments and services is desiderable.
Apart from the electronic resources, traditional paper-based materials are equally important and necessary, and shouldn’t be forgotten. The document delivery service of UNN is a good compromise: traditional and distant students have equal right of access to the collection, and expences are shared between the library and the user. A more extended service is presumably easier to implement by the libraries of UNIPR.
Moreover, if technology cannot overcome the problems of geographical distance in the circulation of paper-based materials, it can help users in the phase of choice and selection of the resources. The OPAC is hardly sufficient for a student who needs to choose among 15 titles he has retrieved by keyword search. When titles are similar and publication date are all acceptabl, some other selection criteria is necessary: the abstract, table of contents or the comments of other users who have read the book could make the choice more easy and reasoned.
7.3 Recommendations for further research
This research is tranversal to many fields of study: it touches the research on the use of a single library, it collects information and data around this particular course, and it considers also the personal information systems of each students, considering geographycal, digital, academic and personal features.
More than for the theoretical discussion, this kind of investigation seems to be a useful tool for improving the possibilities offered to the students of a distance learning course, when the resources of a single library cannot fulfil their learning needs and other resources are available.
Narrower enquiries on the single services that students use or don’t, can be useful to deepen the discussion and aid the implementation of better services. Following the steps of Heine, Winkworth and Ray (2000), the analysis on the ways that users choose and move between the services of the single libraries involved, but studied from the point of view of distant users, could certainly help to improve the services.
Also the digital, academic geographical and personal characteristics, that can be barriers but also positive features, should be considered and studied, in their interaction and analytically.
References
- Heine, Michael, Winkworth, Ian and Ray, Kathryn(2000) Modeling service-seeking behaviour in an academic library: a methodology and its application. Journal of academic librarianship, 26(4), p.233-247.
Eight: Reflective review
8.1 Literature review
The first partof the review is a general introduction to the context of distance learning.
This has become a very wide field of study; the review served mainly as introduction to the reader.
It didn’t explore the reality of services for distance learning in the British or Italian context: not much literature on the attitudes of distant learners in relationship with library services couldn’t be found, except for the book by Unwin, Stephens and Bolton (1998). This research involved librarians, teachers and distance learning students. Its focus and scope is different, so that the findings couldn’t be integrated in this work, but it gave good ideas and suggestion to the researchers.
The second part is devoted to the theorical discussion on user needs, and it’s completed by the review of research methods for this kind of studies, discussed in the research methods chapter. In comparison to this research, the researches and discussions analysed in the review are much more complex and articulated, but the review was really useful to develop the initial ideas into a more scientific and structured research.
8.2 The role of the researcher
The role of the researcher, and the possible bias due to her being a member of the class, were kept into consideration from the beginning of the research.
For the collection of data, the researcher was facilitated, and took advantage of her position.
Besides she constantly tried to keep her personal opinions outside in the analysis of data; the variety of ideas and opinions expressed by the students, some of them so different from her own, made it easy to build a rich and complex picture of the information behaviour of the class as a whole, in which all voices have the same weight.
8.3 Consultation with key informants
The contacts with teachers and librarians were kept on the level of informal consultations, because the aim was to obtain from them information that could clarify and help to describe students behaviour.
The issues of the consutations have been limited to the near ideas and opinions around the services for distant learners. It didn’t investigate topics such as the structure of the library system, funding, management and planning policies of the libraries and their major institutions. There topics surely have a role in the development and the future of library services for distance learners, but were to broad to be included.
The analysis of usage indexes of the services of the libraries by the students of the master class, could surely provide interesting information: objective data to compare to opinions and feelings of the students and librarians themselves.The idea to undertake that analysis was abandoned, because the data of the distant learners’ usage are mixed with traditional use and very difficult to differentiate.
8.4 Consultation with students