Ideas on Making Academic Digital Library More Appealing to Students

Blanka Pašagić & Aleksandar Pašagić: IDEAS ON MAKING ACADEMIC DIGITAL LIBRARY MORE APPEALING TO STUDENTS

Blanka Pašagić & Aleksandar Pašagić

IDEAS ON MAKING ACADEMIC DIGITAL LIBRARY MORE APPEALING TO STUDENTS

Digital libraries are growing in popularity in academic communities worldwide as a result of their obvious advantages over more traditional forms of libraries. However, as with nearly all academic, highschool and school libraries, it often happens that the majority of the library users are in fact faculty, college or school employees, that is teachers and lecturers, which use library's resources in preparing lectures, for scientific papers and for personal improvement. Regrettably, students themselves are sometimes unaware of the advantages academic digital library could provide them. In order to rectify that, it is up to the staff of the library to do what is in their power to increase student awareness of the digital library, its assets and their availability, and to make modifications in the appearance and functioning of the library to make it more appealing to the largest potential body of users, the students. This can be accomplished on several levels.

Obviously, the first thing to do is raise the awareness of the existence of the digital library. This could be done with cooperation with teachers/lecturers and academic administrative bodies. This should be fairly easy; the next step demanding a higher level of effort is making students aware of the potential of the digital library and the relevance of that potential to their specific needs. This step is much like advertising – the needs of the students have to be accurately assessed and addressed when promoting the usefulness of the library. Of course, such an advertising campaign would make little sense if the library doesn't take preliminary actions to prepare itself, its staff and facilities to actually accommodate the needs of students once they come to the library itself.

The preliminary actions mentioned include, first and foremost, having the information students are likely to need, preferably obtained through consultations with the lecturers. Second, such information has to be made accessible to the student without the need for exhaustive searching on his or her part. Preferably, information sources will be ordered taking into account the relevance of the information to the student, and that order is likely to differ from the one needed by scientists or academic staff.

Another thing that has to be taken into account is working hours of the library. Vast majority of academic libraries are opened in the morning and possibly, very early in the afternoon. Such schedule tends to be very unfavorable for the student, since most students are attending lectures during that time of day.

Library staff should pay additional attention to first-time users of the library and provide needed tutoring, or provisions should be made for a suitable manual or computer software that could efficiently educate users enough for them to be able to function independently in the digital library environment.

The above mentioned ideas and approaches are just general guidelines. In order to make a digital library appealing to any group of users, the single most important element would most likely be to pay attention to the specific needs of that user group. Doing so would significantly increase the popularity of the digital library in any environment.

dr. Blanka Pašagić

Tekstilno-tehnološki fakultet, Zagreb

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