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Despite the popularity of mobile and digital technologies, physical collections still have high user demand in academic libraries and grow continuously. With renovation projects providing more studying and collaboration space, efforts to relocate materials to storage facilities are necessary for major libraries. With the change in student information needs and preferences, it is essential to reinvestigate their behavior and preferences for the use of physical resources and remote storage items. An online survey was conducted in a major international comprehensive university in Hong Kong, China, to explore these questions. Statistical tests were also performed to compare the difference between undergraduate and postgraduate students, as well as those with versus those without experience requesting items from storage.

The Hong Kong Design Institute (HKDI) is a leading design education institute in Hong Kong under the Vocational Training Council (VTC) group. Opened in September 2010, the HKDI Learning Resources Centre is a specialist library for the study of art and design. The mission of the HKDI Library is to support and promote the academic goals of the Institute, i.e., to prepare the students for professional careers; emphasize learning through a creative and interactive environment; meanwhile uphold a positively relaxing, and yet inviting environment that is very much similar to a commercial bookstore. In order to accomplish this, the HKDI Library aims to serve as a user-centered library for creative learning--by providing an important place for both students and faculty to actively engage in study, research, as well as socializing. Through a series of small focus group interviews with both students and faculty staff at the HKDI, the study investigates how influential the library environment could be in fostering students' learning and other social activities under a creative environment.

In distance education, communications among students, educators, and administrators have been one of the most important problems. The distance education programs in The Open University of Hong Kong (OUHK) span not only Hong Kong but also many cities over a large area in China. To improve and monitor the quality of communications among students, tutors, and staff, we propose a communications management infrastructure based on an alert mechanism. Requests and messages in these systems (referred to as alerts) have to be delivered and handled timely to provide ubiquitous distance education communication support and management. We also propose using this platform for the integration of partners in China with the OUHK offices. Presently, most systems cannot address urgency and alerts are often handled in an ad-hoc manner. In this paper, we propose a sophisticated alert management system (AMS) for ubiquitous communications management in distance education under various requirements. We develop a model for managing alerts, in which alerts are associated with communication tasks and a set of parameters are captured for message routing and urgency management. The AMS matches the specialties of the educators and staff who receive an alert, based on the alert specification. We then propose a routing mechanism that is initiated when the alert message is not acknowledged or handled within the deadline, so that the alert can be re-routed if necessary. Monitoring is especially essential to ensure timeliness and availability of consultation or decision, otherwise suitable exceptions should be raised and handled. We outline our implementation framework for communications among education administrators, education staff, students, and system administrators, enhanced by alter management via various communication devices for ubiquitous support of communication in distance education. (Contains 5 figures and 1 table.)