How does the Library fit into "instructional technology"?
The following attempts to analyze the ambivalence of librarians. NB that
some of what follows may perpetuate stereotypes and overlook creative
work of hardy pioneers...
The familiar and traditional roles of reference librarians have
included- helping people find the information they seek,
- selecting materials for the library collection, and
- teaching
information access skills and responsible scholarship.
In the last decade all these areas have come to include substantial
electronic and extramural components, but they have been primarily
concerned with text: with print materials (whether
ink-and-paper or as screen images) and scarcely at all with other
media --software, images, video, sound. W&L librarians have been
quite active on the frontiers of electronic development (John Doyle was
an important pioneer in developments that led up to the web, I did a lot
to popularize the web, and my reference colleagues have created really
exemplary resource pages). Our very extensive web materials
on information access go a long way toward raising the skill level of
the faculty and students who use the pages, but we have not experimented
with multimedia and are not likely to do so.
Librarians have taken to the web primarily as a means to point library
users to resources, local and remote, and many librarians are now quite
skilled at navigation and retrieval (indeed, in many places it was
librarians who pioneered the academic applications of the web). Not many
librarians have ventured very far
into content creation for the web, partly because of limitations on time
(electronic media have not saved time for librarians), partly
because of the necessity to deal with arcane software, and partly because
most librarians don't think of themselves as content producers.
Electronic library tools such as online catalogs and indexes have
greatly improved
access to text materials; electronic databases
represent an
efficient distribution for information that also exists in print.
Books and journals --the world of ink-on-paper-- are comfortable and
familiar
territory for librarians, at least partly because those media have a
degree of permanence and (generally) unambiguous location.
Librarians harbor suspicions about non-print materials in general and
"instructional technology" in particular, and it's important to examine
why this is. Here are a number of considerations:
- Ephemerality: the URL for a web page or the availability of a
television program is not a dependable quantity.
- Quality assurance: the intellectual pedigree of many items of
non-print media is indefinable. With a book or a periodical there's a
traditionally understood basis for evaluating veracity.
- Cataloging and indexing: storage and retrieval of non-print media
lacks established conventions and doesn't fit very well with systems
developed for print materials.
- Copyright: murky enough for print materials, a
hopeless tangle for non-print media.
From a librarian's perspective, much of the multimedia side of
"instructional technology" involves uses
teachers make of various materials which don't connect particularly well
with the familiar and traditional roles of librarians as itemized above.
There is an emerging tendency for a 'team' approach to uniting Library
and Media Center resources to support faculty efforts to develop teaching
materials, but in most of the descriptions I've
seen it looks like librarians serve in their traditional capacities,
working on improved access to print materials.
....(more to come)