Electronic Resources in the Virtual Learning

particular those which are fragile, of high value or heavily used.
Increasingly in the late 1990s, public libraries in Britain were becoming
important providers of electronic information, as recognised by the
publication of New Library: The People’s Network (LIC, 1997).
Commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, and
undertaken by the Library and Information Commission (LIC), the
report concluded that although printed publications will remain
important, the role of public libraries in providing access to, and delivery
of, electronic information is expected to increase, particularly for
educational and reference works and government and local information.
New Library proposed the creation of a UK Public Library Network,
connecting every public library to the Internet. Public libraries are also
central to government moves towards the concept of ‘lifelong learning’
and the National Grid for Learning. Furthermore, they have been
recognised as fulfilling an important function as repositories for
community history.
The role of JISC
The Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) has arguably had by
far the greatest impact on the development of the digital library. JISC is
funded by the UK’s Further and Higher Education Funding Councils for
England, Scotland and Wales. Established in 1993, the Committee was
set up to deal with networking and specialist information services. Its
remit is to work with further and higher education to provide strategic
guidance, advice and opportunities to use ICT to support teaching,
learning, research and administration. JISC operates through a
committee system whose members are made up of senior managers,
academics and technology experts working in UK further and higher
education. An executive in turn supports these committees, which
formulate policy and manage the JISC-funded services and strategic
development programmes. JISC provides a centralised and coordinated
direction for the development of the infrastructure and activities, in line
with its five-year strategy. Specifically it provides:
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The digital library
■
new environments for learning, teaching and research;
■
access to electronic resources;
■
a world-class network – JANET (Joint Academic NETwork);
■
guidance on institutional change;
■
advisory and consultancy services;
■
regional support centres (RSCs) for further education colleges.
An important part of the role of JISC has been funding for projects in all
areas of information and communication technologies. For libraries,
however, the most important programme was the Electronic Libraries
Programme (eLib).
The Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib)
The Electronic Libraries Programme (eLib) was launched in 1994 by the
JISC as a direct response to the 1993 Libraries Review by the UK Higher
Education Funding Councils, known as the Follett Report (HEFCE,
1993). Much of this work was pioneering and laid the foundations of the
digital library as we know it today. The entire programme was divided
into three phases, the first two having a budget of £15 million over three
years to fund projects in a variety of areas. The main aim of the eLib
programme, through its projects, was to engage the higher education
community in developing and shaping the implementation of the
electronic library. In Phases 1 and 2, projects were funded in areas such
as on-demand publishing, electronic document delivery, electronic
journals, images and digitisation. Phase 3 of eLib was again a three-year
programme with a budget of £4.1 million. Launched in 1997 research
into areas such as hybrid libraries, preservation and projects into services
was funded. With such a wider variety of projects and initiatives this is
only a brief overview of some of the key projects relevant to this book.
Several projects launched in Phases 1 and 2 are particularly relevant to
this book. Projects examining on-demand publishing and electronic
reserves were important precursors to the set-up of a national electronic
reserve service. Projects such as EDBANK, ERIMS, EUROTEXT, on-
Demand Publishing in the Humanities and SCOPE examined on-demand
publishing whereas ACORN, ERCOMS, PATRON, QUIPS and ResIDe
examined the area of electronic reserves. The issues highlighted by these
projects were summarised in an eLib supporting study undertaken in
July 1997 to examine the impact of on-demand publishing and electronic
reserves (Halliday, 1997). A recurring theme in many of the projects was
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Electronic Resources in the Virtual Learning Environment
the problems associated with traditional short loan collections with ‘…
ample evidence of unsatisfied demand and indications of hiding, theft,
and vandalism’ (Halliday, 1997, p. 125). The advantages of electronic
reserves or on demand publishing were recognised in this report as they
enabled learning resources to be distributed to an increasingly diverse
student population.
Halliday’s report recognised that Adobe Acrobat’s Portable Document
Format (PDF) was becoming the standard format for delivering
electronic readings. The report concluded by highlighting the challenges
associated with implementing electronic reserves systems and many of
these problems are familiar to librarians involved in such initiatives
today, including:
■
obtaining reading lists and in-house produced materials from
academics;
■
a lack of available electronic copies of required texts and the time
spent scanning;
■
running OCR software and proof-reading documents;
■
copyright issues.
Copyright was an important issue in each of the projects. Securing
permission to use material for the projects was often relatively
unproblematic; however, publishers were clear that in a real-world
situation charges would be levied. Most publishers based their fees on
usage. The SCOPE Project proposed a fee of 2.5 pence per page, which
was accepted by a large group of publishers, although in general the fees
varied between 2.5 and 5 pence per page. The major problem concerned
the time delay in obtaining permission to use the material. There was
also no clear consensus at the time as to whether copyright charges
should be passed onto students within a digital system. Although some
departments pass on the cost of producing printed study packs to
students, others are fully aware of the hardships students face and
believe core materials should be freely available. A variety of other issues
were also raised by the projects, including whether such systems ‘spoon-
feed’ students by removing the need to learn how to use library
collections, and the need for lecturer support to make the system viable.
The advantages of online delivery over course packs were examined,
including their importance for distance learning. Issues such as whether
material is designed to be read on screen and the impact this will have
on computing facilities were also considered.
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The digital library
A number of recommendations for the JISC came out of Halliday’s
report, including recognition of the importance of funding a national
electronic reserves service. Consequently, building on the SCOPE and
ACORN project, HERON (Higher Education Resources on-demand)
was launched in 1998 as part of Phase 3 of the eLib Programme.
HERON was jointly funded by JISC and Blackwell’s Retail Ltd and built
a service for those institutions wishing to progress with on-demand
publishing and use electronic text to support learning and teaching in
libraries and academic departments. HERON always described itself as
a ‘project into service’ allowing higher education to experiment with
both the costs and practicalities of the service in a subsidised
environment. HERON offered a copyright clearance and digitisation
service and developed a resource bank of digitised materials for use in
higher education. It also provided a united voice for higher education in
negotiations with publishers and other rights-holders. The start-up
service began at the end of May 1999 with initial subscribers offered the
options of printed course packs or files for online delivery. JISC
continued to fund the service until 2001. The HERON service has very
much shaped the nature of electronic reserves services in the UK and is
discussed in more detail later in this chapter.
The eLib programme examined many digital library issues and 
Phase 3 launched in 1998 specifically examined what it termed ‘hybrid
libraries’ as mentioned earlier in this chapter. Five projects were
launched within this remit, including BUILDER, AGORA, HyLife,
Headline and MALIBU. Rusbridge described the hybrid library as being:
… designed to bring a range of technologies from different sources
together in the context of a working library, and also to begin to
explore integrated systems and services in both the electronic and
print environments. The hybrid library should integrate access to all
four different kinds of resources identified above, using different
technologies from the digital library world, and across different
media. (Rusbridge, 1998) 
Each project developed a model of the hybrid library using different
technical specifications, although often incorporating Z39.50
protocols.
5 
The idea was to provide users with ‘seamless’ access to both
electronic and print resources. Access to resources such as electronic
journals, library catalogues and networked CD-ROMs was often
provided. The BUILDER project was an example of a service that
provided access to an electronic short loan collection within the hybrid
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Electronic Resources in the Virtual Learning Environment
library environment.
6
Meanwhile the Headline Project had the facility to
include course materials, such as lecture notes, alongside library
resources.
The hybrid library projects were pioneering and many of the features
such as customisation, personalisation and resource sharing are highly
relevant to e-learning and are now being incorporated into mainstream
library systems and services. All the projects recognised that different
groups of users have different needs. Hylife, for example, developed six
implementation interfaces for a range of users, including full- and part-
time students, researchers, users in distributed environments and various
subject groupings.
7
Similarly the Headline Project was very much ahead
of its time and enabled users to set up their own Personal Information
Environment (PIE) and include a range of different resources within it.
8
This concept is very similar to the ‘MyLibrary’ approach to
customisation that is now offered by library portal software. MALIBU
also focused on the needs of users, in particular within the humanities
disciplines, and sought to develop ‘innovative and cost-effective ways to
meet the ever-increasing information requirements of staff and students
through co-operative resource-sharing’.
9
The final hybrid library project,
AGORA, developed a hybrid library management system (HLMS) to
provide integrated access to distributed information services. In parallel
with this it also developed library skills materials and experience in the
management of hybrid resources. AGORA aimed to increase awareness
and understanding of the benefits of a standards-based management
framework, and therefore dissemination activities were an important