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M T 137 ORGANIZACIJA ZNANJA 2009, LETN. 14, ZV. 4 potential of OERs. In these days of tight budgets they can be an important element in making higher education more efficient and improving the quality of its teaching. We shall be focusing particularly on Africa because we are concerned that all parts of the word contribute to the creation of the global intellectual commons of which OERs can be such an important part. The OER movement began in North America and Europe with major projects at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) that made the lecture notes of its faculty available and the UK Open University that made its self-learning material available. Although such was not the intention these origins have given the OER movement a somewhat neo-colonialist flavour in the eyes of the developing world. Our aim is that institutions in all parts of the world should produce OERs and all institutions should use OERs. You are better equipped to produce good open multi- media resources on Slovenian history and culture than people in the rest of the world and, in return, you should be looking to Africa for resources on African music. Returning to my short list of the obligations of university libraries to the next point was that distance learners may need library services that are more personalised than those for on- campus students. It is easier to point students to resources in a physical library than in an online environment. But some services can be both personalised and automated. For example, the UK Open University library, which has a staff of 90 serving its 200,000 distance learners, has a service called ROUTES (Resources for Open University Teachers and Students). This provides a set of useful resources for each subject area. These have been checked by the University staff for their relevance and are updated regularly. A newer service is MyOpenLibrary that personalises the service a bit more. In addition to ROUTES it gives students an online space that they can customise to meet their needs. Item four, defend intellectual freedom and avoid bias sounds rather dramatic, but what this means is that libraries have to make choices in the development of their physical and online collections. It is reasonable for a library to focus on the needs of the university’s curriculum and research portfolio rather than trying to build up a balanced collection in all subject areas. To give another Open University example, since it does not teach in the areas of architecture and clinical medicine its collection is weak in those areas. Finally, how does the library respect the integrity of information and intellectual property with distance learners? Needham & Johnson (2007:126) point out that this raises a host of issues in the areas of information literacy and computer ethics, such as netiquette, computer viruses, security of information, plagiarism, documentation styles, copyright, legal downloading, resource licenses, user authentication and information storage. It is not the role of librarians to policy their students but they should advise faculty and students about copyright in building course reserves and teach information ethics as a part of library instruction. Dealing with plagiarism in an online environment is a particular challenge and librarians may need to make students aware of what plagiarism is and why it is wrong, inform them of institutional policies, and train them in how to evaluate and incorporated knowledge sources. Baggaley & Spencer (2005) documented the case of a serial plagiarist at Athabasca University who built up a 200- megabyte database compiled from online sources that he incorporated into his course work without proper attribution. CONCLUSION Let me conclude. Time has only allowed me to give the briefest of accounts of the challenge of providing library services to distance learners. I thought it useful to give you some background on how distance education works before addressing the specific challenge of library services. One useful way of thinking about distance education is to reflect that on campus the instructor teaches whereas in distance education the institution teaches. In a similar way individual librarians serve students on campus whereas distance learners look to the library as a whole for service, which means that the library has to organise itself somewhat differently. The examples that I have given from the UK Open University and Canada’s Athabasca University have shown you how two different-sized institutions are addressing the challenges. There is also a growing literature about library services for distance learners which the librarians among you will find it easy to track down. References [1] Baggaley, J. & Spencer, B. (2005) The mind of a plagiarist, Learning, Media and Technology, Vol. 30 (1), pp. 55 – 62. [2] Needham, Gill & Johnson, Kay (2007) Ethical issues in providing library services to distance learners, Open Learning, Vol. 22 (2), pp. 117 – 128.