Recently-appointed Philip Kent today impressed a crowd of more than 100 staff, students and Friends of the Library when he delivered his inaugural lecture as University Librarian.
As well as being the first annual University Librarian’s Lecture, the presentation was the first in this year’s Information Futures Forum series.
Almost half of the audience — 49 people — completed feedback forms to tell us what they thought of the event.
The first graph (below) shows high levels of satisfaction with the topic and quality of Philip’s presentation.
The second graph (below) shows how people heard about the forum. Most people named only one source of information, though 12 of the 49 respondents said they heard about the forum through two or more channels.
Graph showing the effectiveness of different communication channels. Source: survey forms collected immediately after forum.
Several people offered suggestions for future forums and other events. Suggestions included:
- Web2.0 technologies in academic libraries
- Revisit e-books
- How does the library support academics — why the decline despite more academics
- Someone from Economics & Commerce, given their new location and student numbers
- Tea and snacks to be provided – will increase crowd attending
- Panel of disc. Lib. + their future vision
- CIO’s initiatives for the University/library/researchers
- Google: friend or foe?
- Digitisation – especially cultural collections – is to be desired, but we need to be able to stgore and manage digital resources effectively
- Digitisation of cultural collections.
- Activities of eScholarship Research Centre.
- Liaison/relationship between academics and librarians/information managers.
- Open source software.
- More updates from U Librarian – quarterly?
- Would welcome exploration of Open Access as mentioned
- Specific forms of digitisation
- Faculty heads talking about their information needs and desires
Video of today’s Information Futures Forum will be published on the Information Futures web site in a few days.
If you attended today’s forum and didn’t complete a feedback form, we’d still love to hear from you — feel free to leave a comment on this blog, or send an email to info-futures at unimelb.edu.au