Decreasing resources - new services for university libraries?
Conceptual design and pragmatic approaches to introduce e-Learning at Bielefeld University

Today university libraries have almost a "tradition" in dealing with an increasing number of electronic and digital information. We are licensing and (sometimes) purchasing electronic resources and make it either locally or remotely available to our users. Routines have been developed to deal with some types of this new media within the traditional context of acquisition and access. Electronic journals, databases and other full text documents are new formats but fit principally into our traditional mission as information providers.

Why should libraries at universities become involved with e-Learning?
There are a lot of reasons speaking against a new, additional service, some of them coming immediately to everyone's mind: the budgets of libraries are decreasing, and there is much more work involved anyway to address the requirements dictated by running a traditional library plus digital resources in parallel (the "hybrid library"). Apart form this more internally arising reasons there is a more general one: the whole "learning" sector is, almost by definition, an area that is addressed by the faculties but certainly not by libraries.

It is certainly true that libraries as academic service providers don't have immediate responsibilities for the "learning" activities of their universities. Nevertheless there are a number of reasons leading to a development at universities where libraries (or in some cases university computing centres) are driving and/or supporting the induction process of e-Learning. E-Learning in a wider sense covers all kinds of online and distant teaching and learning activities that are offered by university faculties. It is the work with electronic media but it has also the implications of creating a more and more integrated electronic working environment for students at their universities.

The paper will address a range of topics including:

· Reasons for libraries to get active or involved into e-Learning activities at their universities
· The need for an integrated, cross institutional approach to introduce e-Learning
· Technical and organisational infrastructure for e-learning (e-learning systems, service teams)
· Ways to integrate library and university services into the new e- Learning environment

Bielefeld University Library in Germany is associated with exploring and introducing new information technologies for the deployment within university libraries (e.g. the Digital Library of North Rhine-Westphalia State). The library has preliminarily introduced the commercial Blackboard-system as a course system and carried out an intensive testing period with the advanced Learning System of Blackboard. Two so called building blocks have been programmed within this tests to demonstrate the possibilities of integrating the Online Library Catalogue and the electronic course inventory of Bielefeld University into the e-Learning system. Currently a campus wide working group chaired by the library is working on an integrated concept including different information systems operated by the university administration and the library.

Norbert Lossau
Director
Bielefeld University Library
Universitäts str. 25, 33615 Bielefeld, Germany
PO Box 10 02 91, 33502 Bielefeld, Germany
Telephone: +49 521 106-4050
Email: LOSSAU@ub.uni-bielefeld.de