Training and awareness is intended to play a key role in eLib's efforts to shape cultural change in higher education. The Tavistock's Policy Mapping Study (1996b, p39) describes training and awareness as "a combination of targeted training initiatives and awareness raising and consultative/concertation events and various dissemination activities, such as Ariadne, and most importantly, the eLib web site and lis-eLib". The role training and awareness plays in the cultural change of an organisation relates to the development of shared ways of thinking, beliefs, values, procedures and, it is hoped, relationships of the stakeholders within a grouping. The above definition of cultural change also maintains that structural and social changes within an organisation are also necessary in order for cultural change to occur.
Training and awareness in the programme is addressed predominantly as a separate strand of eLib activity: The Training and Awareness programme area (referred to throughout as T&A) consists of 7 separate projects, which are mostly concerned with new skills and imparting new knowledge to library staff within HEIs. The T&A projects are not intended to address the needs arising from individual projects: The eLib projects themselves were originally intended to cover their own training and awareness needs, but in many cases these were not sufficiently documented in the project plans, and therefore there was no evidence of project-specific training and awareness, whether planned or actual, on which to draw for this report. The two forums which facilitate the discussion of issues and the sharing of knowledge arising from the programme are the lis-eLib discussion list, and Ariadne, which is in itself a T&A project linking eLib with the wider HE community. The discussion in this section concentrates on T&A as a programme area. A short discussion of the roles of Ariadne and lis-eLib is included towards the end.
One of the aims of this Study is to assess the validity of the assumptions about cultural change processes that underpin the T&A projects. These assumptions are important, as they help to make sense of the rationale for treating T&A as a separate strand of activity, as opposed to being linked to other programme areas, or indeed addressing the specific needs arising from individual projects. T&A projects are not concerned with creating new needs for training and awareness (after all, it is the aim of projects in other programme areas to develop new frameworks in which new skills may be needed). T&A, on the other hand, does address the need for new skills, but concentrates on those arising from ongoing cultural change in the use of electronic information, which affects higher education regardless of eLib. The very fact that there is a ready market for T&A courses suggests that the participants have already experienced cultural change in the nature of their work. T&A's assumptions regarding this wider cultural change are therefore important, as without them, the aims and objectives of the T&A projects would flounder.
The assumptions made by T&A projects may be characterised as follows, and to a certain extent are interrelated. Note that the assumptions are not necessarily made by all T&A projects.
While it is recognised above that the rationale for T&A is set very much in the context of cultural changes wider than eLib, it is clear that T&A projects which simply react to these existing cultural change forces will not necessarily effect cultural change themselves. The number of library staff put through training courses and awareness raising events is not a measure of cultural change in itself. There is, however, a T&A project which actively encourages the profession to reappraise and redefine its role in the context of the shift towards resource-based learning in an increasingly distributed or 'networked' HE environment. There is another which seeks to help a library define its culture, in order to see how the introduction of certain factors will have a direct effect on that culture. These are both projects which lay down an important infrastructure for mobilising either the profession or an integral library unit respectively towards a culture for change.
The convergence of library and information services with the IT function is an operational reality for many HEIs, even though in some cases it is an uneasy marriage which has ultimately ended in divorce (indeed divergence is now occurring in some HEIs). It is therefore an important concept, because it is describes the marriage of two cultures, and with convergence comes the need for new roles and relationships. In T&A projects, however, it appears that the convergence concept is not addressed at this level, but only in terms of the new skill needs which have inevitably resulted from libraries embracing IT at the core of their service delivery. For the T&A projects which embrace convergence as their raison d'être, convergence is just a statement of the structural shift of which the T&A projects are already a part, and a justification of their aims: The opportunity to help redefine the roles and relationships needed to make the convergence marriage work, appears not to have been addressed.
There is a prevailing 'bottom-up' approach to cultural change, which in practice tends to send junior librarians on T&A courses, with the assumption that this will filter back into their daily work and gradually affect the ways in which they and their users interact and operate together. This is a random and unstructured approach to diffusing the results, and the effects on the participant and his/her immediate work environment beyond the course are clearly unknown. This is particularly the case as T&A projects appear not to be aimed at library managers and budget holders, who would be in a position to make structural changes to an integral library unit as a result of what they have gained from a course. The cascade method of diffusion adopted by one project (whereby appointed library professionals are trained with new skills with which they subsequently train their colleagues back in the workplace i.e. training the trainers) appears to be a more structured approach to mobilising the participants to have a direct impact in their own library units. Again, though, the effects are likely to be limited if the workplace trainers are not in a position to impact directly on the structure of their organisations.
Within UK HE there is a shifting emphasis from academic teaching to the facilitation of student learning. With this cultural shift there is a greater onus on the provision of learning materials, and this has certainly been facilitated by the 'networked' HE environment. Librarians have always been guides and instructors in the use of information sources, but this new context brings a new set of relationships and with it, the opportunity for librarians to mediate between the teachers and learners. This context is described by one project thus:
"information professionals have the opportunity to take a leading role in developing and delivering the learning support strategies which will be appropriate to this new environment, acting as significant culture change agents within their own institutions."
The process of librarians teaching 'networked learners' in the use of electronic information resources has been dubbed 'Networked Learner Support'. Networked Learner Support is an important concept, which describes a new role for librarians with the real chance to affect the relationship between academics, libraries and students. There is evidence that such roles are already being assumed by librarians and similar activities already exist in some HEIs: The projects involved with Network Learner Support have been an important catalyst in defining and pooling together these collective activities, and giving them the legitimacy of an accepted title. This is an example of how T&A can effectively mobilise pre-existing cultural change.
As discussed in the opening paragraph of this T&A section, cultural change requires changes to both human and organisational factors in order for that change to last. As sources of new skills and new knowledge, it is clear that T&A activities will have an impact on the way library staff perceive themselves in relation to their tasks (and this is an important prerequisite for cultural change). But T&A does not incorporate the kind of structural changes to the organisation of entire library units which would result in lasting changes to roles and therefore relationships within and beyond the library. This is particularly pertinent in the light of one project's experience, that individuals pose less of a barrier to cultural change than institutional factors.
It has been demonstrated in the discussion of assumptions above, that some T&A projects do address structural changes which are happening in HE more widely, although these changes are not coming about as a result of eLib itself. T&A only tends to reflect eLib in the sense that training courses and Ariadne are pointing librarians towards the developments of the more successful technical projects. If T&A is to act as an integral catalyst within eLib, it needs to reinforce more closely the aims, objectives and strands of the rest of the programme, and to act as a communications medium so that projects can learn from others' problems, solutions and knowledge. Above all, T&A should be an opportunity to remind both eLib project staff and other librarians/trainees that eLib is intended to be greater than the sum of its parts, in providing a springboard for new thinking about roles and resources in information provision.
One approach to this apparent mismatch would be for T&A projects to offer the type of generic skills which are becoming necessary across other eLib programme areas (for example, project management, negotiating skills, rights management), in other words, courses need to integrate broader professional competencies and knowledge, not just impart technical expertise. As for professional awareness of electronic library initiatives and their likely impact both on working practices and on more traditional forms of service delivery, it is surprising that library schools do not include this type of coverage in their syllabuses. It would seem sensible for library schools to be more closely involved on T&A, as they provide the obvious focal point and funnel for professional library staff, and indeed it is recommended by one T&A project that links with library schools be established.
If the knowledge and skills acquired by participants on T&A courses are going to feed through into new organisational structures, it will be surely more effective to target managers and budget holders in libraries who are themselves in a position to effect organisational change. One project claims that as it "aims to change the working practice of HE staff, the trainees are given time for reflection and discussion on their changing roles and for thinking about how they will use what they have learnt". There is a possible danger that when relatively junior librarians return to the workplace following T&A courses, they may become frustrated as they encounter the same structures and attitudes within the library as before.
At the time of writing, Ariadne has reached its tenth issue, and continues to mix sceptical viewpoints with factual project descriptions in both the print and WWW versions. It is difficult to judge, without the Study's timescale allowing detailed textual analysis, the extent to which the magazine has changed since its launch in January 1996, and the extent to which it might thus reflect a maturing of the eLib 'culture' itself. More assumptions tend to be made in recent issues about the technical knowledge of readers; this is perhaps reasonable, however, if the technically informative articles are intended to represent a series imparting gradually greater awareness to librarians. The greatest change to the magazine, in its WWW version rather than its print edition (which is more constrained by production costs), is the massive increase in articles to around 40 per issue (whereas issue 1 of the WWW version contained only 21 entries on its contents page).
The most noticeable shift in content perhaps does reflect a certain degree of change in the eLib 'culture', in the trend towards increasingly evaluative, reflective articles about the direction of the field. Additionally, more articles are exploring the problems and issues encountered in implementing new innovations such as electronic journals or document delivery services. Earlier issues tended to describe specific projects in optimistic or neutral terms, leaving critiques of the whole electronic library paradigm (or indeed of the alternative 'traditional' paradigm) to a different set of commentators. More recent issues perhaps show a greater degree of confidence in the field, and also reflect a greater awareness of and profile for Ariadne itself in that representatives of funding bodies and other major organisations are contributing articles or agreeing to be interviewed.
This reflects some maturity among the grouping that consider themselves part of an electronic libraries 'culture', but it is not clear whether this grouping is to some extent merely an exclusive subset of the overall stakeholder 'culture' that eLib is intended to influence. Certainly, we can expect the effect of Ariadne on the overall (academic) library profession, as with other T&A activities, to be gradual rather than revolutionary. It is reasonable to assume that where it is being read, it is likely to speed up changes in perception of librarians towards the rise of electronic resource provision and the exploitation of the Internet.
For the purposes of this Study, the 12 month archive of the lis-elib e-mail discussion list was examined to look for evidence that the list has facilitated discussion of cultural change within eLib. Use of the list has been dominated by the solving of technical problems and issues (although these have reduced since a separate list was created for these discussions in November 1996), and by postings which advertise, among other things, jobs, conferences and Web sites. Furthermore, postings to the list have been dominated by a relatively small number of contributors, representing a cross-section of the eLib community. However, there has been little evidence of any discussion on the cultural change effects of eLib: lengthy discussions which could be construed as related to cultural change have included copyright issues and how to disseminate the results of projects as they draw to an end. Nevertheless it is reasonable to conclude that there has not been active participation in discussions which could help to form and change views on key subjects. Thus lis-elib was not a useful source of data for the Study.
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