“As a university with a strong sense of place, Melbourne reaffirms the unique virtues of its campus locale, where face to face teaching remains the norm, where scholars gather from across the globe, and where learning communities embrace evolving technologies.”[109]
The University library has always embodied the linking of the strands: providing the collections and specialist staff to support our research, teaching and learning and opening our doors to the broader community. Our collections underpin scholarship in all its forms. Our very successful Friends of the Baillieu program demonstrates how the library is embedded in the broader community.
What is the university’s commitment to widespread dissemination of its scholarship? Its research data? Its learning materials? Its scholarly publications?
What is the university’s commitment to the stewardship of its scholarship? Its cultural and special collections?
Melbourne’s concept of the triple helix provides a framework for even greater differentiation. At a time when changes in scholarly practice are blurring the boundaries between the strands we are poised to leverage these benefits through the Melbourne Model and our approach to research. The places we create for scholarship to flourish — our libraries, our collections, our information systems and infrastructures, our learning and teaching spaces — form a critical part of realising this vision.
What should be the balance between investing in physical and virtual infrastructure?
How best can virtual infrastructure support the Growing Esteem vision? How best can our physical space support the Growing Esteem vision? Do we wish to progress a precincts-based approach to libraries, Student Centres and other student services? What is the right balance between small specialist libraries located close to the relevant academic unit as compared with larger libraries which provide greater breadth of collections and deeper services during longer opening hours?
What is the right balance between browsable collections, collaborative spaces and individual spaces in the Melbourne library of the future? What will scholars and students be prepared to access by connecting to electronic sources rather than viewing physical collections? To access by recalling the physical object from a non-browsable source?
By leveraging the capacity of information and the underpinning technologies to provide access to scholarly data and research instruments regardless of location — and to provide access to the necessary know-how, collaborative tools and infrastructure — we enable our students and staff to be engaged in learning, research and knowledge transfer in an integrated way.
For example, in partnership with the Faculty of Arts, Information Services is currently imaging the convict records of the Archives Office of Tasmania. It is a collection of great complexity, comprising over 30,000 records that relate to 75,000 men, women and children transported to Australia during the first half of the 19th century. This complex collection will be publicly available and linked to other sources so that students, researchers or genealogists can focus on an individual convict, look at their birthplace, crime, religion, personality type, work, punishment etc, and move seamlessly across to other relevant Internet resources. The Faculty of Arts will use this collection as a research tool, often working in partnership with other disciplines such as population health to mine the data. The collection will serve as a teaching tool which provides potential opportunities for students to undertake their own research.
At the same time, the project creates a knowledge transfer tool of international value.
Such a case exemplifies the opportunities to link the triple helix through information services, systems and technologies. They bind the three core activities of the University in ways that enrich each of those activities. This case also illustrates the exciting emergent possibilities in collaboration and the blurring of boundaries between the roles of academics, librarians, students and technologists.
Do we wish to invest in mining our collections, in using our capabilities in scholarly information and technologies, to link the strands of the helix to create learning communities? If so, which areas should take priority?
What roles do we need within the University to support the creation, validation, dissemination, use and curation of scholarly information? What types of information professionals will we need? With what capabilities?
The University faces a range of potentially disruptive future technological and societal changes. It is clear that the consequences of many of these have yet to play out and that a high degree of flexibility will be required. What is the University’s level of commitment to building flexible infrastructure? What is its role in experimenting with emerging trends, business models and tools in the creation, dissemination, access, collection and preservation of scholarly information?
The University has historically invested in some infrastructure and collections largely on its own and sometimes in collaboration with other institutions. Examples of collective action include the Australian Partnership for Advanced Computing (APAC) and CARM, the shared storage facility for Victorian university libraries. Of the myriad challenges and opportunities we face, which do we need to tackle collectively? As an individual institution?
The University of Melbourne is a significant producer and owner of copyright material and other intellectual property. As an owner, it is exposed to the risk of infringement by other parties — in the digital world, infringement is easy and inexpensive. The University spends several million dollars per year in licensing copyright materials for its own use and in turn earns income from licensing multimedia courseware to others. We can reasonably expect these costs to continue rising. Inevitably the University’s interests as an owner conflict with its interest as a user of copyright material.
To the extent that we enter public policy debate on intellectual property, do we speak as an owner or user? We face an inescapable dilemma in developing policy and procedures that facilitate, encourage and stimulate both commercial and non-commercial exploitation of the University’s intellectual capital.
Do we embrace the Open Access movement and similar movements like Open Source and Creative Commons, with a sense of public-spirited sharing and collaboration amongst the not-for-profit education and research community? MIT’s Open Course Ware initiative has made a difference, as have other universities’ initiatives: Melbourne could do so too, if it chooses. If that is where we want to go, what are the appropriate policies, procedures and incentives?
Alternatively, do we seek a future in which universities actively license intellectual property for profit to each other and to wider communities?
Can we have it both ways?