Information Futures

If this Consultation Paper poses a single overarching question, it is this:

How should we develop our scholarly information and technologies, services and infrastructure to achieve our research, learning, teaching and knowledge transfer aspirations over the next decade?

Rapid and unpredictable changes in information technology mean that we will need to reconsider this question every few years. But a changing environment is not an excuse for inaction. Rather, it calls for deliberate choices to be made. By not making choices we risk a dilution of effort, we risk finding that poor planning forces us into continually trying to bridge the gap between our aspirations and our ability to deliver,[3] we risk falling behind our competitors in attracting and retaining the best academics, the best students, the best professional staff.

Our initial consultations and research have identified a multitude of possible responses to the underlying trends and challenges we face. Yet we cannot do everything. The work of the Information Futures Commission is to engage the University community in making what will be difficult choices.

This Consultation Paper aims to stimulate a vigorous conversation among members of the University community and with relevant external stakeholders. For the purposes of this conversation we propose that ‘scholarly information’ has four dimensions:

1. Published information and collections used by our scholars to inform their learning, teaching and research. Published information and collections may be in many formats and may or may not be provided through the University. Of particular interest from a planning perspective are the information and collections the University (normally through the library but not always) negotiates access to or collects. These include books, refereed journals, maps, monographs, images, DVDs and videos, audio recordings and other physical materials. Increasingly information is produced in digital format and we are seeing a growing tension between free access and market-driven models of publishing. The term ‘scholarly information’ also refers to other primary sources typically collected by a library, museum or archive: for example letters, financial documents, mementoes and other contents of personal and business archives; or museum collections of instruments, samples or other objects.
2. Materials created for learning and teaching purposes. These could include, for example, course notes, presentation slides, customised ‘packs’ of selected readings for a particular subject, audio and video versions of lectures, and a range of digital objects that can be stored in a learning management system and reused in different ways and at different times.
3. Information created in the course of research activities. Examples of such information are numerical data collected from scientific instrumentation and laboratory work; information collected from surveys, interviews and other social studies; records of meetings and conversations between collaboration partners; models, plans or images created in the course of design, architectural or ethnographic research.
4. Research outputs such as papers, chapters, monographs, articles, letters, presentations, posters, demonstrations and speeches, processed research data, visualisations of large datasets, models, web sites and multimedia objects. Information produced for the purposes of community engagement can be considered a subset of this category.

We cannot separate a discussion of our plans for scholarly information from a discussion of the underlying information technologies, given the inter-connectedness between the information and the form in which it is used. Scholarly information technologies include the tools, systems, infrastructure and processes by which we create, identify, manipulate, classify, index, store, preserve, search, retrieve, deliver and use scholarly information. New technologies are evolving rapidly — not only in the online world but in the built environment, requiring reconceptualisation of learning and teaching spaces, libraries and social spaces. With new technologies and ideas come new expectations for physical spaces, for how we design, inhabit and reconfigure them to fit a variety of purposes.

Over the next few months, in consultation with the University community and stakeholders, the Information Futures Commission aims to:

• Understand how we create, use and communicate information in our individual scholarly activities
• Consider how we wish to make our scholarly output available to and usable by others
• Imagine our preferred future state and:
  • Identify the approach we wish to take to collecting or connecting to information
  • Determine what technologies, systems and infrastructure we must access or provide
  • Define the preferred characteristics of our physical spaces (teaching spaces, learning spaces, libraries)
  • Develop a strategy to build the capabilities of our staff and students to find, evaluate, create, share, present, use and manage scholarly information effectively in a digital environment

The release of this paper will be followed by a broad-ranging consultation process. In June 2008 the Commission will produce its final report proposing a 10-year strategy for our scholarly information and technologies, a strategy which will require the University to make some choices. Some of these choices will require courage and a willingness to leave behind some of our dearly held practices and assumptions so that we may embrace bold new opportunities in the future.