This research seeks to find the new trends in virtual reference and online learning by looking at the impact of COVID-19 on academic libraries, and by identifying gaps in professional development for academic librarians, particularly in reference and instruction. Responses from the surveyed academic librarians indicate that many services…

The Open University (OU) is the UK's largest distance education provider and has a large and growing disabled student population. Disabled user support presents particular challenges for an online library service in the distance learning environment. The OU introduced guidelines for working with non-OU--authored content (external content) in 2011…

There are three challenges academic institutions must address in order to achieve the goal of ensuring that distant students are afforded the opportunities of independent learning: (1) academic libraries must effectively utilize technology to make the information resources in their research collections accessible to distant students; (2) academic…