Campus
libraries are still popular places where students can go to study and work on
papers while mixing in a little socializing. One thing most of those students
won’t do during a trip to the library is open a library book. They’ll do that later—online.
As Campus Technology notes, academic
libraries are experiencing a shift in how they provide materials to students
for research and course readings. More students (and also faculty) are
accessing the library’s collection through e-reserves.
Students
may not be all that crazy about studying from a digital textbook, but they do
find it much more convenient to go online from the comfort of their own laptops
to tap into the library’s materials to gather information for a project or to
read something their professor has placed on reserve for the class. For
research, in particular, print books are too cumbersome.
From the
perspective of librarians, though, there is one major hurdle: learning
management systems. Far from being dismayed at the move from print to digital
usage, campus libraries are eager to accommodate students online. They’d like
to be able to integrate their e-reserves with the school’s LMS to create a
one-stop-shopping location, so to speak, for student reading materials. At the
very least, libraries want their catalog to be incorporated in the LMS search
function to show students and faculty what’s available through the library.
However,
library systems and learning management systems are not always fully
compatible. Some schools required extensive customization to get both systems
to work together, while others created an LMS from scratch in order to build in
access to the library. Still others opted to develop library guides that could
be placed within the LMS.
