Phil Long's article is well worth reading -- and I think, very much along the lines of what we're thinking here at the Interactive University.
Have you looked at the library resources in courseware management systems lately? Look again. There isn’t much of what you might consider "library material" there. What might library materials useful for online learning look like? Examine the richness in the offerings from the library itself and you’ll begin to get an idea.
To be fair, the reasons library resources are absent from courseware tools aren’t entirely external to the library. Libraries have traditionally operated on the assumption that there is added value for users to come through the library for services. Yet it is becoming clearer all the time that faculty and students may not find the same value proposition. Librarians can and do provide added value to students looking for material from collections as well as from the Web. But people building the courseware infrastructure, as well as the courseware modules, don’t know what services to expect—or in programming terms, to "call"—to integrate library resources, materials, or special functions into their courses.
Librarians need to think hard about what services they wish to deliver to online environments and clearly articulate how they might be accessed from courseware systems. This requires a radical shift in thinking because "calling" a resource says nothing about the behavior it will exhibit when it appears at its destination. Until libraries begin to think in terms of services they can offer courseware developers, it is not likely they will find a home in these tools.
It won’t necessarily be for lack of interest, though I don’t see a deep understanding of what library resources are from courseware vendors, either. Nonetheless, libraries must decide on their suite of services and define clear mechanisms by which they can be invoked in support of a learning process or in courseware environments. Doing anything less will only accelerate their disappearance from the experience of our students. That would be the least desirable of the potential future outcomes for online learning.