The Consultation Paper released on 29 February 2008 provided an overview of trends in the external environment. Below are selected extracts from that paper, highlighting some of the key drivers for change. Full text of the paper is available from the Information Futures web site.
The amount of information published each year continues to grow. The digital universe in 2007 was about 281 billion gigabytes in size, and predicted to double by 2011. Two-thirds of the 23,000 active, refereed scholarly journals available globally are now published online. In this digital world, printed works are produced at a greater rate than ever before. More than three thousand new books are published daily, with an estimated three billion books published in 2006, an increase of 0.5 per cent on 2005 figures. The cost of editing and refereeing scholarly works remains relatively high and publishers’ prices have increased markedly in the last decade. Most universities are able to acquire only a small fraction of the world’s scholarly works, though cooperative partnerships can extend an institution’s access to academic materials.
In this digital networked world there are few barriers to self-publishing and almost anyone can access this published material. There is an illusion that information is free. Public search engines, user-generated content and the increasing ubiquity of Internet-enabled computing are challenging the traditional sources and notions of authority.
Scholarship is changing in many ways, in the quotidian practice if not in the intellectual substance. The Internet is an important research tool, with a rapid increase in the use of data, databases and datasets as both inputs to and outputs from research. Massive computing capacity enables researchers to tackle massively complex problems in new ways. Collaborations spanning disciplinary, organisational and national boundaries are becoming commonplace. There is increasing pressure from funding agencies to ensure that research outputs and research data are made as widely available as possible through initiatives like Open Access repositories.
Researchers can now download and use original data created by others, and teachers can repurpose objects created by others, far more easily and quickly than in the past. Digital information can be copied, transmitted and manipulated, transformed and combined cheaply from almost anywhere in the world, and the price of transmission is usually independent of the destination. Just as libraries have been regarded as essential research infrastructure, so now are high-bandwidth networks, large data stores and high performance computer infrastructure.
Researchers, teachers and students can be co-creators of new and synthesised knowledge in ways not previously possible, raising interesting questions about the structure of academic work. The digital world has changed what we can do with information. Copyright and other intellectual property rights are about what we may do with information and increasingly these concepts are being challenged by what is possible. It seems likely the regulatory environment will become more complex, at least in the medium term.
Teaching spaces can now enable more than a one-way lecture, and are equipped with multimedia equipment and furniture designed for interaction and group work. Learning spaces and libraries are no longer reserved for solo endeavours: increasingly, students prefer and are encouraged to work collaboratively, requiring a mix of spaces that enable silent, quiet or loud study modes and that are flexible enough to adapt to different purposes as needed.
Many universities are grappling with these issues. Few have taken an holistic view of the scholarly information and communication process, instead looking through a particular lens at the disruptive changes that are occurring. Some are questioning what their library future should be, others what approach they wish to take to Open Access, many are beginning to worry about the emerging challenges of research data management and curation, and others are questioning what level of investment to make in information infrastructure, in buildings or how to structure their services. Each institution is crafting its own solution based upon its own research and teaching priorities, its history, its current state, its values and philosophy. The familiar and constant models of the past are changing irrevocably, with no consistency emerging thus far.
For example Harvard, across both its Faculty of Arts and Sciences and its Law School, has mandated Open Access publishing. MIT has its Open CourseWare initiative. University College London is creating a new building to house its special collections of early printed books, manuscripts and archives, relieving pressure on current library spaces. ANU is moving 800,000 items into leased off-site storage to manage its space pressures. UC Berkeley has built a new Music Library and East Asian Studies Library through US$60 million in philanthropy. Stanford University is reducing its Engineering Library to almost a third of its previous size: in the new library all reference works and journals will be digital, 40,000 books will be replaced by 40,000 e-books and 12,000 print books, study spaces are smaller and the number of subject specialist information professionals will more than double.
It seems reasonably certain that the increasing pace of change in scholarly practices will demand in response a high degree of flexibility — in spaces, in services, in technology, in the structure and essence of information itself. The University of Melbourne is unlikely to influence most of the ways in which the information infrastructure is created and interacts globally with society, but we are in a position to choose which of these changes require our response, either in advance or as they arise.