The Library Has Left the Building, But...

Even though digital resources are now front and center in higher ed, libraries must still work hard to integrate them into their schools' LMSes.

• By Keith Norbury
• 12/05/13

Photo: Shutterstock.com

For anyone still clinging to notions of a library as a dusty repository of dead knowledge, consider this little nugget: On April 16, aka "library snapshot day" at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the library transferred a terabyte of data to users, and its Web site recorded visitors from 98 countries and 45 U.S. states and territories. Even though 16,201 people also entered the university's library facilities that same day, it's safe to say — for the most part — the library has left the building.

"It's not as if we don't have people coming [to the libraries], but the real meat of our connection…is over the network," said Tim McGeary, director of library and information technology at UNC Chapel Hill.

You won't get an argument about that from Rhonda Kitchens, an instructional design librarian at the State College of Florida, Manatee-Sarasota (SCF). Her library long ago breached the confines of its building to deliver services electronically, and most of her interactions with students now take place online. Yet Kitchens is frustrated that barriers still exist between learners and library resources. The library may have left the building, but it hasn't found its way everywhere it needs to go. And, in Kitchens' experience, the biggest barrier is the learning management system.

As she sees it, the majority of LMSes don't provide an intuitive, easy way to integrate library resources into course materials. To illustrate her point, Kitchens recalled text conversations she's had with students while staffing the school's Ask a Librarian service. "I'm trying to discuss with them things on their syllabus where the faculty member doesn't know how to bring the library into the actual course," she said.

Kitchens conceded that a savvy faculty member can build a library into a course by incorporating e-books or databases, or even by building live searches. "There's lots of really great things that do work even with the LMSes as they exist," she explained. "But it seems like, to some degree, as the LMSes progress, they've really left the library out of it."

A Need for Customization
Interviews with librarians, educators, and IT professionals at other institutions indicate that Kitchens' experiences aren't unique. While many schools have found ways — often ingenious — to integrate the library into their LMSes, the solutions are generally not part of the basic LMS feature set and require workarounds or customization. The upshot, in Kitchens' view, is a level of integration that is anything but optimal.

It's an issue that some LMS vendors recognize. "I've actually been a little bit surprised that there hasn't been traditionally more interplay between the library systems and the LMS," said Brian Whitmer, cofounder and chief learning officer of Instructure, whose open source Canvas LMS is used in more than 400 educational institutions nationwide. "It seems like kind of a no-doubter to me, but for whatever reason it hasn't happened very well. I'm hoping we can change it."

To connect users to the library, Canvas currently utilizes Learning Tools Interoperability. Developed by IMS Global Learning Consortium, a nonprofit organization dedicated to setting standards in educational technology, LTI enables third-party services to launch from within an LMS framework "and to look and feel like part of the system," Whitmer said. Even so, the Canvas LTI connection still requires a separate login to access library materials. Instructure is now working to provide a more seamless experience so that library resources, such as copyrighted video, can be launched from within Canvas without a separate login.

For its part, Blackboard defends its LMS's ability to integrate library resources seamlessly. "Many institutions we work with make their library system available within their LMS so that students have seamless pass-through authentications and access to closed resources such as journals," noted Deborah Everhart, product management and strategy director for Blackboard. "These integrations in some cases include e-reserve functionality for specific courses."

It's a claim backed by Blackboard clients such as The George Washington University (DC). According to Karim Boughida, the university's librarian for digital initiatives and content management, electronic resources such as assignments, reading lists, and bibliographies are inside Blackboard and link to the library's portal: "So students don't need to leave Blackboard to connect to the library Web site or the library search engine."

But Boughida acknowledged that this functionality required customization by the university that involved hooking directly to the content by parsing the metadata. While the level of customization was not heavy, said Boughida, it's not something that librarians or faculty could have undertaken on their own. In fact, he credited implementation of the workaround to the library's good relationship with the academic technology department. "When you have a really good internal partnership, you don't have to do much politics to get things done," he explained.

At SCF, which uses the Angel LMS (also owned by Blackboard), integration of library resources is more piecemeal. Kitchens encourages faculty members to utilize a library widget for Angel and "put it next to anything that says library," or beside anything that requests research materials based on the syllabus, a project, or an assignment. "But it's not built into the LMS, which is a shame," Kitchens said. "It should be."

For large schools with in-house development capabilities, integrating the library seamlessly with the LMS may be easier. UNC Chapel Hill, for example, developed an application several years ago that allows library resources to be embedded into the course pages of its Sakai LMS. The app also provides a proxy URL so off-campus students can access the library without any additional effort.

"I think it would be carrying on a poor stereotype that the library is slow changing if we didn't point out that this has actually been happening for quite a while," McGeary said.

UNC Chapel Hill also provides library services for its teaching hospital and other local hospitals. This enables health practitioners, such as medical students in residence, to access the library from within patients' electronic health records. "We went electronic almost completely as early as possible," said Jim Curtis, interim director of the Health Sciences Library at UNC Chapel Hill. "And when we did that, faculty in particular stopped coming to the library."

Non-LMS Solutions
Developing custom solutions that require alterations to the LMS can pose significant challenges for school libraries, though. For starters, it usually means involving central IT, which adds levels of oversight and complexity — and sometimes delay — to a project. Secondly, if the school ever switches LMS vendors, much of that work may have to be redone.

Bypassing all of that was one of the benefits of the myLibrary initiative at the Rochester Institute of Technology (NY), which contextually integrates library resources into specific courses. Developed by the library itself, the solution is simple for the very reason that it "doesn't involve coding inside the LMS," said Jonathan Jiras, technology services librarian at RIT.

Utilizing course numbers as its organizational foundation, myLibrary uses APIs to pull data from other sites, and tags data feeds coming from the registrar's office. "We are able to create a customized view within any course shell, showing the most appropriate library and contact information, course reserves, and library resources, by essentially parsing that course number," Jiras explained. For example, myLibrary would recognize that "HIST10101.2131" refers to a certain section of an introductory history class offered in a certain quarter. And if a specific library guide isn't available for that course, a default history guide will appear in its place, said Sue Mee, RIT's global education librarian.

Individual librarians, however, can author guides by using a vendor-supplied content-management system of library guides such as Springshare's LibGuides. "The librarian can easily update it without having to know how to write programs, or code, or anything like that," Mee said.

The secret to ensuring that the linked resources are relevant — not puffed with chaff the way Google search results often are — said Jiras, is "tagging by professional librarians. One of the things that librarians do and do well is categorize and classify information."

The cost to develop myLibrary was "minimal," Jiras said. He worked on the programming with the help of students earning $12 an hour, while Mee worked on the content selection. After about 100 hours of student work, "we had this thing polished nicely," Jiras recalled. And, Mee pointed out, "If we change learning management systems down the road, we can just pick up and keep using this, because it resides outside the LMS."