The project „E-learning library”: concept and implementation

Abstract

Education and libraries have always been closely interconnected, despite all the changes that educational systems and libraries have undergone over the past centuries. In our times, the collaboration has become even more important and the new forms of education, together with the development of ICT tools used in education urges libraries to renew their services in a radical way. In order to meet the newly arising needs of educational institutions, libraries must undertake new tasks which have not been tested in library environment before. One of these tasks is the active support of e-learning management systems. There are many unclear issues concerning the role of libraries in e-learning. Intensive work is being done by experts of ICT and education worldwide in order to elaborate and fine-tune effective models. Hungary has also started to investigate the ways of setting up and operating a national digital collection of textbooks and learning resources. One of the ongoing projects carried out in the framework of the Hungarian Strategy for ICT in Education is called the e-Learning Library. The project aims to gradually replace print publishing of textbooks with digitally stored educational contents. Another aim is to set up digital resource centres which primarily serve customers, but also operate as centres of competence in educational innovation and methodology. The paper intends to give a definition of e-learning libraries and clarify their role in the educational system.