Library Learning

The German public library system has a reputation for top-notch individual libraries. The mere mention of the State Library in Berlin or the Bavarian State Library in Munich is enough to make most librarians salivate. Yet just 10 years ago, the system as a whole was disjointed and difficult to navigate.

Enter the Internet, which in a decade has reshaped the German public library system. In September 1999, the library system ? with the assistance of the Bertelsmann Foundation, a private philanthropic organization, and ekz.bibliothekservice GmbH, a library service firm ? instituted bibweb (www.bibweb.de), an e-learning program to train librarians in participating public libraries. Since its release in March 2000, more than 1,000 librarians have learned how to use the Internet for communication, research and customer service.

Christian Hasiewicz, the project director for the Bertelsmann Foundation's public libraries division, has been in charge of the bibweb project since its inception. Assistant editor Chris Jones recently interviewed Hasiewicz about his experiences.

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How widely accepted is e-learning in Germany?
Online training is a growing market in Germany. The largest conference on this topic (Learntec in Karlsruhe) took place in January 2001. It showed that a lot of companies like DaimlerChrysler and SAP are using online learning. Nevertheless, providing a whole professional group, such as librarians, with a specific Web-based training program is an approach that is still rather rare in Germany.

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What have been the biggest challenges associated with the project?
If you develop a technical solution that didn't exist before ? for example, our highly customized online training program ? one challenge is to stay within the scheduled time and budget. Time, especially, can be a critical issue when technical problems occur. In this project, we were able to meet this goal. Because of an excellent team, we released the first module even faster than originally planned.

Another pitfall in online training can be your users' equipment. Do they have Internet access? How much bandwidth do they have? What kind of browsers do they use? Since many German public libraries suffer shortcomings in technical equipment, the challenge was to find a compromise between an online course that is state-of-the-art, on one hand, and has low-end compatibility on the other.

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Were people hesitant to take training online? If so, how did you convince them to try it?
There is a very strong acceptance of bibweb among librarians. To support this, we did a lot of PR work and advertising, stressing the benefits of online learning. Nevertheless, for most of the participants, online learning is an approach that's completely new to them.

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How do you maintain a high level of quality?

The best thing you can do is to get in continual dialogue with your target group, even before starting the project, to hear what they are looking for. Open the feedback channels. We established a steering committee for the evaluation of the project, which consists of 15 experts from different professional areas. Our steering group is one of these channels, and giving participants the opportunity to comment on the course is another.

One of the things I really like in having librarians as our target group is the qualified, self-confident and polite comments you usually get from them. We gained a lot of valuable inspirations on how to improve our service.

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What's next for the project?

Since the idea of using online training to disseminate knowledge among librarians turned out to be very successful in Germany, we are looking for partners in the United Kingdom or the United States to translate the course and to distribute it in other countries. Our main goal would be to look for best practices, develop model projects and transfer them into other cultural areas to test their universality.