Library Services for Students Abroad

Every few days this winter, one or another of our elite universities has been grabbing the headlines with new ways to enrich the student experience, whether with financial aid programs that will diversify and support a stronger student community, or most recently, with Princeton, a new initiative to transform education itself. The details are yet to be worked out, but Princeton speaks of a pre-freshman year abroad (what the English call a "gap year" between secondary school and university). They will send up to 10% of their students overseas (a couple of hundred?), supporting them with financial aid as needed.

Such a program raises all sorts of interesting questions, but surely points the way ahead to a time when many if not all college students make some kind of for-credit study abroad part of what they expect of university life – sometimes in advance of actually setting food in a campus classroom. Now I don't mind remembering the old Monty Python routine about the "news for parrots" (you can google this term and find the short video on uTube), making fun of the tendency of everyone to see the big events of the day in terms of their own parochial interests: so I don't mind asking the question, "how does this affect the work done in college and university libraries?" Princeton will have special issues (for example: Do pre-frosh count as students and so do they get the same access to licensed electronic resources as other students? How will they be trained to use the University's various resources before disappearing over the horizon?), but the wider issues are ones of community and the place of libraries in the communities.

What services will our students need as they roam more widely than ever from home base? Will they need different content? Different forms of access? Different forms of support and instruction in the use of tools? And what will be the various roles of faculty and librarians in helping them maintain robust connections back home? I can't help but seeing this not only as an important responsibility for libraries, but also as an important opportunity – to be the institutions on campus that send out robust tentacles across the planet, linking our students (and of course our wandering faculty as well) to home base as well as the intellectual communities we support.

What are other libraries doing about these emerging "global" support issues?