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Paper presented by Gülçin Cribb, Audiovisual Librarian, University of Queensland Library, at the 2nd National Preservation Office Conference: Multimedia Preservation - Capturing the Rainbow, in Brisbane, 28-30 November 1995.
  • Educational Environment
  • The New Library Environment
  • The Multimedia Facility at the University of Queensland: A Case Study
  • Collecting Multimedia
  • Staff Training and Support
  • Library's Involvement in Training Academic Staff in the Use and Development of Multimedia
  • Conclusion
  • Bibliography

Educational Environment

Imagine a scenario when two academic staff from different universities communicate over the Internet to collaborate in creating a teaching resource for a particular course. The resource is a package available on the Web so not only their own students, but others can access it as well. The package incorporates text, graphics, sound, movie clips and still images. It has links to the University's home page which gives students access to other sites useful for the course, enables them to undertake interactive tutorials to improve their information skills, lists e-mail addresses of both teaching and library staff to ask for help, lists useful video clips and other resources illustrating concepts discussed in the course which students can choose anytime they wish. The clips and images come from the library's digital collection. Library staff have been involved in the planning and preparation of the self-paced interactive multimedia tutorials in collaboration with the academics. Students are expected to create their assignments in multimedia format by incorporating their own text, images and clips from other collections and compose the document with appropriate links for assessment. Students collect their data in a multitude of formats from all over the world. They interview people by way of videoconferencing and store the data on the Web to access it later on. This scenario is not from year 2000 or later. This is already happening now at some schools and at some universities.

The lecturers deliver their interactive teaching sessions by way of videoconferencing. Guest speakers, prominent academics deliver public lectures from anywhere in the world to anywhere in the world. Others edit such lectures, seminars and interactive sessions and create a whole new teaching tool or use it for research purposes. Primary source material in many disciplines is included. There are examples of such initiatives on the Web in areas ranging from Engineering to Medicine to Archeaology.

Courses are being increasingly delivered by flexible mode. Many of you may have heard of Professor James O'Donnell of Bryn Mawr University teaching advanced Latin to students in different parts of the world on the Web. Teaching staff in some departments at the University of Queensland have created electronic discussion groups to communicate with their students and to encourage discussion amongst the students in a way which is not dissimilar to traditional tutorials. Many departments and courses have their own Web pages with appropriate links to other Web sites, course materials and electronic publications. An increasing number of reviews of publications appear on the Web. Electronic publishing and communication are not confined solely to universities. Schools, companies, government departments and many professional and community organisations have their own Web sites with links to the publications of their own and other organisations which often include not only text, but sound, still pictures, animation and video.

It is not possible to educate today's students for the 21st century without multimedia and the Internet. Students coming to universities today will have experienced multimedia instruction at school, or have experienced multimedia interactions with computer games, at trade exhibitions and information booths. Today's graduates will be employed in jobs where high levels of computer literacy and ability to use information intelligently are often essential requirements. The Federal and State governments are providing resources to schools and public libraries to ensure access to the Internet by the wider community, in particular school children. Lifelong learning rather than learning just to obtain a degree has been identified as a major goal by many universities. The role libraries play in this area is central in terms of provision of access, collection of digital materials or guides to their location, teaching information skills to the students to learn how to learn and being active partners in the teaching and learning process with the faculty.

Electronic publishing of scholarly papers and books on the Internet is on the increase. The cost and difficulty of producing and distributing books in paper format was discussed by Janet McCalman in defence of publishing in paper format (McCalman, 1995) and by Bob Moles in defence of publishing on the Web (Moles, 1995). Electronic publishing on the Net has become increasingly important, particularly prior to publication, because of the need to speed the time between submission and distribution. Bob Moles claims that "With electronic publishing, the universities can take complete control of their intellectual output - deliver it to academics, students and outside commercial and public interests - and provide improved returns for authors and reduced costs for users of that information".

The New Library Environment

What involvement should libraries have in relation to multimedia? Are librarians able to provide access, assist clients with teaching, learning and research needs today, and also make sure that material is collected, retained, preserved and made available for the future ? What about publishing? Involvement of libraries in publishing is not new. Some libraries have been involved in traditional production of print resources. Libraries have also been in the business of reformatting information for use by their clients. They have managed bibliographic data. Provision of access to the content of publications has long been a responsibility of librarians. Content is now the catchcry and as librarians become more involved in re-formatting information and creating digital forms, they are being steadily drawn into the production business, as well as the management of information. What additional skills do they need to cope with electronic publishing on the Net or on disk?

Library managers and staff work with new conditions and realities these days, such as;

  • the concept of the virtual library: Provision of resources and facilities, not just within the walls of the library, but where the client is, be it in the classroom, in office or home, the places where they undertake fieldwork. Virtual universities and virtual degree courses need virtual libraries too.
  • access to networks, databases of electronic resources including multimedia;
  • information, training and guidance in using the electronic resources.
  • searching for, acquiring and providing demonstration and evaluation copies of software.
  • facilities in the library as central facilities for students to work independently or in groups.
  • use of multimedia facilities as electronic classrooms.
  • linking of academic teaching, learning, research activities with the vast quantity of resources available both locally and on the Internet.
  • facilitating close collaboration with academic departments and service departments by undertaking joint projects for innovations in teaching, learning and research, such as electronic publishing, creating multimedia products on the WWW or on disk.
  • collaboration with academic staff in training students to incorporate electronic resources into their learning.
  • help students and staff gain information literacy skills necessary for lifelong learning.
  • provision of central multimedia facilities in libraries shared by a range of academic departments to achieve cost effectiveness.
  • provision of commercial training to teach public use of electronic resources.

I intend to discuss issues of collecting, provision of access and facilities to the clients, training of library staff and then training of users regarding multimedia collections. Planning, establishment and management of the Multimedia Facility at the University of Queensland will be referred to as a case study to illustrate some of these issues.

The Multimedia Facility at the University of Queensland: A Case Study

The planning, establishment and management of the multimedia facility at the University of Queensland will be used to illustrate some of the issues discussed above. Planning for the facility began soon after the completion of a report (Cribb et al,1994) on the use of information technology for teaching and learning at the University of Queensland which was the outcome of an action learning project undertaken by a team of people from the Library, computer centre, TESOL program and the Tertiary Education Institute in 1993. The report pointed out that lack of centralised facilities, lack of information and advice, lack of time, inadequate training, lack of support personnel, cost of hardware and software were some of the major barriers to the use or increased use of information technology for teaching and learning. University administrators were working on a draft information technology strategic plan at the time. At the same time, quality funds were becoming available to encourage use of information technology in teaching and learning. The three academic service departments, the Library, Prentice Centre (responsible for the computing and audiovisual facilities and services) and Tertiary Education Institute (responsible for academic and general staff development and improvement of teaching and learning ) successfully applied for grants to establish a Multimedia Facility in the Library. This activity also stimulated the development of a Multimedia Policy as an extension to the University's Teaching and Learning Enhancement Plan.

The role and functions of the Facility are to:

  • provide opportunities for academic departments to explore the development and use of multimedia and other teaching programs;
  • enable academic staff and students to see, experiment with and use the latest IT hardware and software for teaching and learning;
  • provide a central multi-media facility for academic staff and students to use to support their teaching and learning;
  • develop further expertise of staff within the Academic Services Group in dealing with multimedia;
  • facilitate the delivery of multimedia learning materials to students and staff;

The Facility has been operating since April 1995. It consists of two large rooms with over 40 workstations, 30 of which are PowerMacs. All workstations are networked with access to the University's network and the Internet. One of the rooms is a training room with 19 PowerMacs including the trainer's machine connected to a video projector. The second room has PowerMacs, Pcs, Macs, printers and a scanner. Students use this room for independent study . The Training Room is used for a variety of purposes including:

  • tutorials by lecturers to demonstrate particular software packages, WWW sites;
  • as an electronic classroom to teach languages and other subjects;
  • seminars and workshops by library staff to train students and staff in the use of Internet, WWW, CD-ROM databases, personal reference databases and other electronic resources;
  • demonstration of primary source materials in different disciplines on electronic networks eg journalism, media studies, history, research methods;
  • training of academic staff in the use and development of multimedia for their teaching;
  • as a facility to create joint Web documents by groups of students as part of their assessment under the direction of their tutors.

The variety of uses for the student workstation area seems to expand continuously. It can be summarised as follows:

  • use of multimedia courseware developed by teaching staff, in areas such as biochemistry, microbiology, physiology, pharmacy, anatomy, geography, statistics, linguistics, audiology, languages and literature; All courseware programs are available on the network.
  • use of multimedia courseware acquired from other institutions to support particular courses, such as Aboriginal languages, phonetics, foreign language tutorials and biological sciences as well as access to Uniserve sites which are clearinghouses established by CAUT (Committee for the Advancement of University Teaching).
  • use of general and reference multimedia products purchased from commercial sources, such as Microsoft Art Gallery, McGraw Hill Encyclopedia of Science and Technology, Perseus, Investigating Lake Iluka, Grandma and me and many other language programs both to learn foreign languages and English. These programs are usually recommended by teaching staff to students to use as learning resources;
  • use of Internet to research particular topics for assignments;
  • use of e-mail to communicate with tutors and other students or anyone else in the world. Some e-mail discussion lists have been set up in specific courses to discuss and locate relevant information resources, topics and issues.
  • use of CD-ROM databases for research;
  • use of wordprocessing and other tools to support assignment work;
  • use of reference materials and general skills packages eg on typing, writing essays, speed reading, information about computers, Internet and so on;
  • creating Web pages or Web documents required for certain courses;
  • creating training programs or language teaching programs as part of a course assessment.

From the day it opened, the Multimedia Facility in particular the Training Room has been heavily booked for courses by lecturers and library staff who teach information skills and Internet use. Bookings for 1996 started coming soon after the opening. Feedback has been actively sought from the users of the Facility in order to make it as suitable as possible for their use. Services are adjusted according to needs and requirements of the users on an ongoing basis.

Collecting Multimedia

Multimedia collection development should be undertaken in the same way as the collection of other materials. The University of Queensland Library has an extensive audiovisual collection (unusually so for universities) which has for many years supported teaching and learning activities on campus. Collecting multimedia became an obvious outcome of this activity. Initially, as with all new formats, there have been many questions that need to be addressed. Issues such as responsibility for selection, selection criteria to be applied to different kinds of multimedia, equipment and human technical support required to make multimedia available and accessible, shelving and circulation policies, funding, networking, decisions to purchase network and or site licences and who pays for them need to be addressed in the collection development policy. Consideration needs to be given to different types of toolware, such as authoring, graphics, wordprocessing, Web editing and database and personal reference database programs, as these are necessary tools for the creation of multimedia. Technical support to deal with network issues is very important, as multimedia resources are more readily accessible if they are available on the library's network. The process of obtaining reviews and evaluation copies of multimedia is similar to that of videos and films, except that demonstration copies of some of the multimedia programs are sometimes available on the Web.

Staff Training and Support

The creation, management and support of multimedia in libraries require at all stages skilful, knowledgable and flexible library staff. Staff need to know not only what SGML, HTML, URL and many other acronyms mean, but also how to create Web pages, electronic discussion lists, how to teach use of various WWW search engines, how to install new versions of graphics programs, Internet navigation tools, CD-ROM production and use and advise the clients on the most appropriate tools in order to access the resources they need. Academic staff are increasingly looking upon library staff not only as mediators with information sources, but also as experts in multimedia use, development and preservation. Image and document digitizing and access provision are areas where librarians are being consulted in academic institutions.

Initial training is required to equip staff with the skills, knowledge and experience they need to create, support and manage "virtual" libraries. New graduates from library schools will be expected to possess multimedia creation expertise. There also needs to be ongoing staff development. A commitment from the library administration needs to include both financial commitment, and the encouragement of staff to take time to learn and use the new tools and methods to meet the challenges and opportunities of multimedia in the library.

Constant change and learning new skills were not easy for staff who were used to dealing with traditional audiovisual and print materials and services. The Library has been providing a small computer assisted learning facility for many years and the staff had some familiarity with use of computers for learning. Computers have always been part of library staff's daily work life. Moving from 386 or 486 pcs to PowerMacs and MPCs in our Multimedia Facility has required some adjustment and learning. Most of the staff training was done in-house by allowing staff time to practise with the software and hardware. Two members of staff who have more expertise and skills than others acted as resource people to teach the rest of the staff. Staff were encouraged to attend various courses run externally and by other library staff on Internet, digitisation of images and Windows. Hardware and network connections were set up by the Computer Centre, partners in the project. Library staff learnt a great deal during the implementation by liaising with the Computer Centre staff on a daily basis and helping them as well.

Library's Involvement in Training Academic Staff in the Use and Development of Multimedia

The University of Queensland's Multimedia Policy for Teaching and Learning (1995) outlines a number of areas concerning use and creation of multimedia, but emphasises staff development. "One of the greatest impediments to successful adoption of multimedia can be low awareness among academic staff of its potential. Staff development is widely seen as necessary to raise the awareness of the majority and restrain the unrealistic expectations of an over-enthusiastic few."

The University's multimedia policy for teaching and learning clearly states the role of the library in terms of coordinating acquisition of multimedia, management of the central multimedia facility and the staff development program. The Library was asked to coordinate a staff development project to raise awareness of academic staff in the use and development of multimedia for teaching and learning. The project has been funded for one year to establish the program, run all the activities planned and present a report. It will then be incorporated into the mainstream academic staff development program on an ongoing basis. The main aim of the project is to provide information and advice on multimedia by bringing together a group of experts amongst the teaching staff and other experts such as instructional designers, librarians and curriculum advisers to present the content with plenty of hands on demonstrations. The activities include:

  • A series of three seminars, each of which is of three hours duration. The first seminar covered areas such as the potential of multimedia, evaluation, types of multimedia products, various options, multimedia off-the-shelf and on WWW, costs and benefits.

The second seminar concentrated on the use of the Web as a teaching and learning mechanism, HTML documents, email and quality of information on the Web as well as use of the Web as a source provider and as a delivery mechanism. The third seminar is about creating multimedia for teaching, learning and presentation. It will look at various tools, techniques and external and internal facilities available to help create multimedia packages. All seminars include discussion on curriculum and funding issues. The seminars have been repeated at least twice to accommodate demand. The first seminar was run at one of the off-campus sites to enable academic staff located there to attend. All seminars have been formally evaluated. The Multimedia Training Room is used for the seminars which give additional insight to academic staff into the availability and potential of facilities.

  • A trade exhibit which brings together commercial hardware, software suppliers and multimedia developers and suppliers as well as the university's computing and multimedia development sections to enable academic staff sample the products and see demonstrations of packages.
  • A series of talks and demonstrations by experts from external organisations on topics related to the program.
  • An internal electronic discussion group to improve communication on multimedia matters within the university and to exchange ideas and information.

Conclusion

In conclusion, I would like to quote some of the responses academic staff gave to the evaluation of seminars for multimedia awareness:

  • certainly widened my view.
  • gave me lots of avenues to explore.
  • I needed to see something of its potential.
  • excellent eye opener.
  • Now I have more idea of what it is about.
  • More please.
  • I didn't realise the library was involved in helping with the use of multimedia.

As with the use of most computer-based projects, the multimedia facility and staff awareness program are never really finished. The University of Queensland Library has embarked on establishing other multimedia facilities in branch libraries. Three others are already up and running and two more are in the process of being implemented. Staff in other sections of the library are learning from the experiences of staff at the Multimedia Service and designing the new facilities and services to suit the needs and requirements of their clients, addressing issues such as maintenance, troubleshooting, staff training to provide access and advice to their clients in the use of these facilities. There are still other management and access issues, including copyright to be addressed. As technology improves and provides new opportunities and the quantity, quality and range of information available in digital formats expand, both library and teaching staff will face different challenges.

Bibliography

Cribb,G., Holzl,A., McCarthy, M., McPherson,K., Williams,W., Andrew,D. (1994) The use of information technology (IT) for teaching and learning at the University of Queensland: final report. Brisbane, the University of Queensland.

Moles,B. (1995) A case of homepage or perish. The Australian, 22.11.1995 26-27.

McCalman,J. (1995) Web snares the market, but not the quality. The Australian, 15.11.1995 28.

A Multimedia Policy for teaching and learning (1995) St Lucia, Brisbane, The University of Queensland. (unpublished policy document).


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