To understand how Melbourne compares with Australian and overseas institutions we reviewed statistical data about usage and resource levels of services, size and usage of collections, and investment in collections and infrastructure.
People and capabilities
In general Melbourne students have good access to technologies such as personal computers, mobile phones, MP3 players and the Internet. While the use of such technologies for learning is reasonably well accepted at Melbourne, high overall levels of technology ownership and use do not necessarily mean that all students have the same level of access or capability. Equity will continue to be an important consideration in our planning.
Library staffing levels at Melbourne are below par for Group of Eight (Go8) universities, and declining, though it is becoming more difficult to benchmark as there is increasing divergence in what constitutes library services. In 2006 Monash, Queensland and Sydney had between 28 and 46 more library staff than Melbourne, with library staff per campus population member placing Melbourne below Sydney, Queensland and ANU. These staffing levels, coupled with the large number of libraries we currently sustain (19), are evidenced in lower library opening hours (almost 20 hours per week less than Monash).
Compared with other institutions, our library expenditure per user is below par (about 2.65 per cent of total university expenditure in 2006 compared with 3.16 per cent at Sydney, 3.76 per cent at Queensland and 3.81 per cent at Monash) although Melbourne’s libraries are among the most heavily used. Primarily we are delivering a high volume of transactional or commodity services: loans, physical spaces, online catalogue and search. We lent more than 1 million items in 2006 and had more than 3 million visitors to our libraries. Most use our libraries daily or 2-4 times per week, in person or online, and Melbourne scholars borrowed almost 40 items per full time equivalent scholar in 2006 compared to 36 at Sydney and Monash, 33 at Queensland and 25 at ANU. Almost all Melbourne’s libraries are open to the public.
External trends indicate the need for higher-level ‘new media literacy’ competency — knowledge and skills in areas such as copyright, privacy, ethical behavior, personal identity management, evaluation of source quality, synthesis of ideas and information. Harvard and MIT are (collaboratively) exploring information literacy education for undergraduates in terms of privacy, authorship and ownership, credibility and participation in scholarship. Postgraduate students are currently the most frequent users of information literacy and reference enquiry services at Melbourne.
The overall quality of our library services this year slipped from the top 50 per cent band for Australian universities (we now rank slightly below the median). Our library staff are regarded positively by library users, who would like to see improvements in the availability of computer workstations, the quality of the physical environment and availability of seating.
In 2006 University IT staffing levels at Melbourne were generally equivalent to those at peer institutions. Whilst we appear to be lagging in provision of IT support for students this is likely to change over the next few years as learning precincts are redeveloped and the Melbourne Student Services Model takes effect.
In the emerging area of e-research it is clear that Monash, Queensland and ANU have invested much more heavily in the relevant information professionals and infrastructure. At Monash there are approximately 60 library and information professionals across the e research group, the library and the IT division, specifically to support e-research initiatives (and they plan to grow this in the near term) compared with fewer than 10 staff at Melbourne. Monash hopes to co-locate these professional staff and grow the numbers to one hundred.
Information
Our library collections are acquired primarily through the Materials Vote which is indexed against CPI and enhanced through bequests and trust funds. The Materials Vote’s purchasing power is declining. We have $3-5 million less buying power than major Australian competitors, and we are slipping further behind. Library acquisition patterns are changing: for example, many journals are now only available digitally. Open Access publishing to date has not removed the need to purchase commercial digital titles. External studies have shown that people who use digital sources heavily are also likely to be heavy users of print materials. Our scholarly collections need to enable this mixed-media approach to scholarship.
Unlike most of our Australian competitors we have collections which remain unavailable through our online catalogue. We also have significant collections in need of appropriate curation. Funding is needed for cataloguing and preservation of archives, special collections and cultural collections. Active management and development of the University’s library collections, special collections and cultural collections could result in higher usage rates and greater value to scholars and the University. For example, library collections could be better leveraged in curriculum design; and improvements in the extent and quality of our catalogue records could help to expose little-used but significant collections to the scholars who need them.
Physical space is a constraining factor in the storage, use and management of all our collections. Our shelves on campus are filled to capacity so each new purchase requires that we place items into storage.
A significant amount of Melbourne’s research output is listed in public-access databases such as the Australian Digital Theses project and the ARROW catalogue, which link to source documents held in our own ePrints repository, other Melbourne systems or elsewhere.
Compared to other universities we tend to have more records in these cooperative databases. The current strategy of providing bibliographic data (regardless of whether the full text is available) remains sound, providing a public profile for Melbourne scholars in multiple environments that are highly searchable.
Like many of our competitors we have yet to grapple with the challenges of research data management, though this is an area in which we have particular expertise that could be applied.
The University participates in several inter-library lending schemes and shared repositories. There is demonstrable value in continuing these cooperative arrangements, as we are a net borrower from other institutions.
Infrastructure
This is the area which has been most neglected. Spaces for student collaborative and quiet study have been eroded as the University has grown its staffing numbers, as increasing print collections have replaced student space with shelving. Recently we have seen the creation of exciting, contemporary technology-enriched learning spaces, yet our ageing library spaces have remained inflexible and inadequate. The Eastern Precinct development provides the first opportunity to redress this in many years.
We have insufficient space for collections to be housed and managed effectively. Availability in our libraries of computer workstations and lendable laptops has repeatedly been identified by our students as something they highly value but we struggle to meet demand.
Some of the emerging student centres and learning space developments, such as that in Engineering, may relieve pressure on libraries to provide basic information services and learning spaces, but other changes to the campus will also be required in order to meet student needs. Each new staffed Student Service Point on campus increases our costs, potentially eroding the hours that the Service Point may be open. Each un-staffed facility requires thought be given to managing any security and safety matters.
There will need to be a balance struck between the types of services and spaces we wish to provide for our students. At some universities (Engineering at Stanford for example) libraries are being created that are largely technology-enriched learning spaces, with extensive digital collections, limited print collections and library and information professionals on hand to assist. The relationships between library spaces, learning spaces, computer laboratories and social spaces must be considered.
E-research is an emerging and rapidly developing field. The University has invested in our network to raise it to an appropriate standard but has made limited investment to date in provision of the necessary infrastructure to support e-research more broadly, specifically in data storage and management services for researchers, high performance compute (HPC) facilities and associated services. Other Australian universities are investing heavily, as are international competitors (particularly in life sciences and physical sciences).
We are the only Go8 university which does not have an appropriate identity and access management system to effectively participate in the emerging Australian Access Federation, an initiative designed to enable our researchers to participate effectively in international research collaboration. A robust, flexible identity management system would also enable the implementation of other collaboration tools. It is reasonably clear that Melbourne must invest soon or be left behind in research prestige, competitive grants, commercialisation and other opportunities. This requires a whole-of-University approach coupled with collaboration with external partners.
Melbourne has relied largely on a single commercial vendor for provision of its campus-wide learning management system. Recently we have begun to leverage our membership of the SAKAI initiative and added internally-developed tools to create an extended “LMS+” environment. This brings our LMS technology strategy into line with similar institutions in Australian and North America.
Videoconferencing is well supported in teaching spaces; competitor universities are enabling VOIP and videoconferencing at desktop level and Melbourne will be doing so over the next two years. We have recently acquired an OptiPortal capable of high bandwidth videoconferencing.
Wireless access on campus is currently being improved, bringing Melbourne up to the standard most Australian universities have enjoyed for some time.