Author Archives: informationfutures

Introduction

“Scholars in all fields are taking advantage of the wealth of online information, tools, and services to ask new questions, create new kinds of scholarly products, and reach new audiences. The Internet lies at the core of an advanced scholarly information-intensive collaborative research. These developments exist within a rapidly evolving social and policy environment, as […]

Process to date

We approached the strategy development process in two stages. The first stage consisted of a consultation process aimed at opening up the questions, exposing the complexity of the environment and the opportunities and challenges before us. We hoped to elicit a wide range of views and opinions and to explore all the significant issues.
The Vice-Chancellor […]

External environment

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 […]

Current state

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 […]

Feedback from consultation activities

For an understanding of scholars’ aspirations and expectations we drew upon the results of previously-conducted studies and on the preliminary results of a survey conducted by the Information Futures Commission. We also reviewed the more than 70 written submissions received and the outputs from the exploratory workshops held during April.
The hundreds of participants in this […]