As I write this column, the Open University (OU) is approaching the beginning of another academic year, and with it comes the beginning of our annual 5-year planning cycle. As an institution, the OU is in the midst of a scenario consultation process to review and update scenarios first developed some 3 years ago. As I begin to think about the future and what my management team and I will address in our unit plan, I realize that quite a lot has changed over the last couple of years; perhaps there has been a step change in both the environment and thinking about e-learning and teaching which is now impacting practice. This column is based on an informal presentation given at the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland, Dublin in August 2005 and draws on expertise provided by the Learning and Teaching Office and Student Services division of the Open University. The Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Learning and Teaching, Dr Paul Clark, in an OU internal document, Open University E-learning policy, defines e-learning as: on-line collaborative learning; on-line, individual or collaborative learning; learning through the use of ICT (either stand-alone, on-line individual learning or on-line collaborative learning). The OU uses the most inclusive definition. Clark further describes the University's rationale for e-learning in the following ways: students achieve outcomes that, for distance learners, require e-learning; e-learning provides more effective delivery of teaching and learning support; the OU enhances the achievement of its strategic objectives (fair access, brand, markets, pedagogy, global delivery and quality leadership) through the use of e-learning. For campus-based students, e-learning provides an enhancement to face-to-face learning, allowing students flexibility in which they access material and efficiencies in administrative functions, e.g. pushing out notices about examination dates. For distance learners, including those learners at a distance from a central campus, e-learning provides new ways of doing traditional things, including on-line tuition, student tracking and learner support (both academic and pastoral). It provides a mechanism for working in groups, opportunity for peer assessment, access to resources to support projects and resource-based learning, and the opportunity to acquire information handling skills vital to all those living and working in the 21st century. In order for e-learning to be effective it must, however, be linked to assessment and must be integrated into the whole pedagogic package rather than added onto the workload. Learner-centred institutional objectives have been set by the OU to inform the strategic development of the Institution. These objectives focus on the experience and benefit each learner will gain from a wide range of e-learning opportunities: experience of graduated development of ICT and e-skills required by the Quality Assurance Agency and professional accreditation bodies, the development of modern work-related and independent learning skills and a sense of community. In response to these changes, one of the significant developments which have taken place in the OU is the creation of a Business Steering group (BSG) informed by an Architecture Design Authority (ADA) to bring together a pan-university technical infrastructure. This group constitutes the University Secretary and Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Learning and Teaching with the heads of Computing Services and Learning and Teaching Solutions (which develops OU course materials). As a result of the work of this group, the OU has introduced three key corporate systems: a customer relationship management system (CRM), an enterprise content management system (ECMS) and a virtual learning environment (VLE) project. Each of these developments will significantly impact the way in which Library Services will develop support to learners in the future. Although all these systems will affect the development of digital library systems, I do not propose to focus on either the VLE or ECMS, but it is worth commenting on the CRM in so much as it is a direct feedback system managing interaction and feedback from learners and will particularly provide information on how learners are engaging with e-learning. It will identify areas where product improvement or enhancements are needed. The CRM system will allow all those staff working directly with learners to log details of these episodes. It will provide a tracking mechanism to ensure that enquiries are followed up and closed and will facilitate the tracking of enquires that may need re-routing to other parts of the OU, allowing the Associate Lecturer (tutor) to ensure that the learner has the most appropriate support. The logged episodes will provide a better understanding of how a learner is doing and will allow the associate lecturer to improve the quality and timeliness of the support to each learner. Analysis of student episodes will also allow the OU to understand where improvements to its offering (whether academic or pastoral) may need to be made. The corporate CRM will take over from the enquiry logging software (Remedy) used by Library Services so that Library Services enquiries will be managed in a consistent way to those in other areas of the OU. The quality and content of our responses will be auditable, while the nature of the enquiries will be available for analysis to inform continuous process improvement cycles and the planning process within Library Services. Library Services enquiries will also be available to inform the wider University support to learners and to feedback to individual curriculum owners. In many institutions, supporting e-learning may be spread across a number of units and, as the focus of our activities moves to becoming learner centred, mechanisms need to be found to ensure that the learner is unaware of these discrete groups and operations. For example, the Student Services division at the OU provides support to over 200 000 learners from their first enquiry through to the completion of their studies. Their role, set out in an internal OU document, Student support in the Open University, is to provide advice and guidance in course choice, to develop induction materials, study skills and personal development materials, and to provide the record of achievement. This is carried out by a team of advisors. A further 8000 part-time Associate Lecturers (tutors) are involved in marking assignments, providing feedback, supporting through face-to-face, telephone and conferencing, monitoring student progress and acting as the first point of contact for study-related issues. Other units involved directly in Learner Support are the Computing Help Desk and the Library Services Help-Desk. The Library Services Help-Desk takes several forms. There is a phone line available, but we also provide support through web chat, e-mail, fax and the conferencing software used by course teams (FirstClass). The role of the OU must be seen in enhancing the learner's experience, particularly by supporting active, independent learning behaviours. By looking at the behaviours of the 16–19 year olds use of technologies and learning styles we can begin to see how technology might be used to engage learners of the future. The Joint Information Services Committee (JISC) Learning and Teaching Committee is currently researching in this area under the theme ‘Understanding my learning’. Their focus is on the learner's view of e-learning and a research study is underway to look at learner participations and perceptions of e-learning. The OU Library Services has carried out its own modest research by interviewing a small group of 16–19 year olds to hear how they use games machines, iPods, MSN web chat and other tools to support their lifestyles and to test out how these technologies might affect their expectations for the delivery of learning. We have found that they are always connected and very visual, which has significant implications for the wordy documentation and web contact beloved by librarians. They are increasingly independent learners, creating content as well as using prescribed content and searching for their own materials, usually over Google. They are significantly orientated to working in groups, whether in physical or virtual contact (using MSN, a webcam and microphone—the use of voice-over Internet services such as Skype was well practised by this group). They expect to be experiential learners, both contributing their own experience and learning and reflecting on the experience of others. The role of OU Library Services is focused around enhancing the learner experience by supporting the development of active, independent learning behaviours. We aspire to advise all course teams of the availability of rich, quality resources and to ensure that available materials (such as news stories, articles) are up to date and refreshed. Librarians are involved in designing learning activities where students interact with a variety of materials. They also design activities, linked to assessment, which include a range of skills connected with finding and evaluating information. We seek to provide opportunities for the learner to become familiar with the literature of their subjects and provide them with encouragement to build personal bibliographies, linked in future to e-portfolios. Particular challenges lie in how we will become learner-centred in order to meet individual needs and behaviours. Market segmentation has become an important consideration in the development of services (and forms part of our Best Value programme) and is supported by detailed analysis of our known activity data (including use of electronic resources). Personalization is another obvious area to explore and in the OU it is expected that this will be facilitated through the VLE. Simplifying resource discovery in an environment increasingly influenced by Google is essential. Recent research for our Students and Libraries survey2 project has given feedback that learners find the very rich quantity of electronic library resources available through our OpenLibrary website challenging. These resources are becoming increasingly complex to the learner, as they include many different types of resource, from bibliographic record to images and newsfeeds. This is particularly apparent as learners move between searching Google and searching OpenLibrary. No doubt we are not the only digital library to receive this type of feedback. One way to address this for level 1 courses is to integrate library resources into the pedagogy. This will mean direct feeds into the virtual learning environment (VLE), thus losing their branding as Library Services resources. In this learner-centred environment we must consider if it will matter whether the source of the resource is given. I don't mean by this, the citation, but from which unit in the institution the resource comes. Perhaps it will be more important to the learner to be able to click through to the resource in a simple operation? Of course, for higher level courses, learners will need to use the digital library in a more sophisticated manner in order to search for and select their own resources. Simplifying resource discovery will also require attention to the integration of internally generated resources and learning objects (course materials) with those generated externally. The development of federated searching, the semantic web and concept searching will all be influential factors here. In order to deliver such an integrated approach, the implementation of an enterprise content management system (ECMS) will be needed. Such a system brings a complex set of issues for the Library which must be concerned with developing metadata to support the workflow and retrieval aspects, as well as development of business taxonomies and good practice guidelines to support document management concepts. I propose to return to some of these issues in a later column. Two further challenges exist in developing support for e-learning. Development of the skills agenda for both staff and learners will be fundamental to effective e-learning. Work in the UK in this area is extensively documented elsewhere, but at the OU we have our own 10-point course (100 h of study) available to all OU staff and learners. Now we have moved on to developing a diagnostic tool to assist users to assess their own skills level and to allow them to focus on improving areas of weakness. Alongside this is the development of a toolkit to support Associate Lecturers. The skills agenda can be linked successfully to the requirements for employability of graduates and to resource-based and problem-based learning. Finally, there is a significant requirement to keep up to date with new developments in e-pedagogy thinking, in new technologies and in the development of standards. In restructuring our senior staff portfolios we have developed a clear senior remit for addressing these areas. Our strategic and systems development team are tasked with finding innovative ways for supporting e-learning, to research these, provide experimental activities and to disseminate trend information. One of the main challenges which develops from this is to work across boundaries of the OU, both to ensure understanding of what is happening elsewhere within the institution and to ensure that ideas are fed into emerging OU thinking and strategy. Advocacy for the role of the Library Services in developing e-learning models is critical. It is also a considerable change-management challenge to tease out the competencies and skills mix required to move the whole perspective of supporting e-learning forward.