Many thanks to everyone who submitted a written response, commented via this blog or attended a meeting or focus group session during the last fortnight.

The written submissions are available from the main Information Futures web site.

Over the next 10 days we will revise the strategy and seek further input from the University’s senior executives and from the Information Futures Commission’s Steering Committee.

The completed strategy will be presented to the 26 June meeting of Academic Board for endorsement, then to the 14 July meeting of University Council.

An implementation plan will be presented to the Planning and Budget Conference at the end of July.

1. Progress Report from the Commission’s Steering Committee
2. Melbourne’s Information Future: one possible strategy

The documents outline the Commission’s work to date and describe some long-term options for the University’s library, archive and cultural collections; research data management; IT support for research activities; collections of information created for learning and teaching purposes; scholarly outputs such as theses and journal articles; and the support services and human capabilities required to create, acquire, use and manage all of these.

The documents are available for downloading from the main Information Futures web site, or in a ‘commentable’ format on this weblog (see the “Progress Report” and “Draft Strategy” links in the navigation bar at the top of this page.)

We encourage you to read and comment on the documents.

Of particular interest are the five “strategic questions and difficult choices” identified in the Progress Report:

1. What type of library or libraries should we have?
2. What should be in the libraries?
3. Who can use our libraries?
4. How ‘open’ do we want to be?
5. How should we organise ourselves to achieve our aspirations?

Ways to respond

• Read the Draft Strategy on this blog and leave your comment/s on the relevant pages
• Download the documents from the main Information Futures web site (where you will also find lots of background information about the initial consultation phase and its results)
• Send your comments to the Commission’s project team
• Invite a member of the project team to speak to your committee or group meeting

Deadline for comments

The review period ends on Friday 6 June.

What happens after 6 June

Your feedback will be used to refine a 10-year strategy for the University’s scholarly information and technologies.

The revised strategy will be presented at the June meeting of Academic Board and the July meeting of University Council.

A funding proposal will be submitted to the Planning and Budget Committee’s mid-year conference.

It ended at close of business on Friday 9 May 2008.

In the intervening two-and-a-bit months,  more than 300 people joined the Information Futures conversation in some way:

• filling in a survey
• writing or contributing to a submission (we received 66!)
• emailing or phoning to offer their ideas
• attending an Information Futures Forum
• attending a student-staff consultation forum
• inviting the Commission to attend a committee meeting
• requesting an individual meeting or briefing

So — what’s next?

This week the project team is drafting an interim report, drawing together the main themes that have emerged during the consultation period. The interim report includes a draft strategy for the University’s scholarly information and technologies.

The draft report will be:

• discussed at a Steering Committee meeting on Wednesday 14 May
• presented at Academic Board on Thursday 22 May
• released for review and comment on Friday 23 May

The final review period will run for two weeks, from Friday 23 May to Friday 6 June.

During the review period, a range of staff and students will be invited to attend focus groups to discuss detailed aspects of the draft document.

As well, we will seek input from all interested members of the University community, including our friends from Victoria, interstate and overseas.

Once finalised, the interim report will become three documents: a report, a strategy and a plan. These will be submitted to the June meeting of Academic Board, then the July meeting of University Council.

There are only 7 working days until the deadline for responses to the Information Futures Commission.

As of 6.00 pm Tuesday 29 April we had received:

• four written responses from faculties and other groups
• written responses from seven individuals
• 125 completed surveys
• 10 comments on the Information Futures blog
• many informal emails

As well, we have run several exploratory workshops with students and staff, hosted four Information Futures Forums and an open consultation forum, attended a dozen committee meetings and consulted personally with deans, committee members and other interested individuals.

All in two months. Whew!

The consultation period comes to an end on Friday 9 May 2008, the deadline for all submissions to the Information Futures Commission.

If we haven’t heard from you yet, it’s time to get yer skates on. Come on, you know it’s important :-)

I suspect this is a view held by many- it certainly looks pretty complex from my perspective and I’ve had the chance to immerse myself in this for several months! But as the management textbooks will tell you, making no choice is, in fact, making a choice.

We have a rare opportunity to imagine the scholarly information future we would like to create. It IS difficult and complex. We live in a world which is characterised by rapid and unpredictable technological change and there is no sign that this will abate. But I am a firm believer in our ability to shape our destiny.

I want to encourage you to provide your great ideas, your concerns and your idle thoughts, no matter how unsure you are about them, so we can shape the best possible future for our University. I look forward to reading them!

Linda

The conversations we have in the next few weeks will directly shape the University’s 10-year strategy for scholarly information and technologies. If you have an idea, a suggestion, a comment or a question, now is the time to speak up!

At yesterday’s project team meeting, we noodled out a diagram showing the process for consultation and drafting the strategy. (Click the image below to see a larger version, or keep reading for a description of what the diagram means.)

As Commission leader Linda O’Brien noted this week, “The first stage of the consultation process has been focused on opening up the issues, exposing the complexity of the environment and the opportunities and challenges before us. In this way we hope to elicit a wide range of views and opinions and ensure that we have explored all the significant issues.”

We started by publishing a Consultation Paper that defined the questions we needed to address.

During March and April we have sought ideas and input from the University community and from external stakeholders. We have held forums with guest speakers, attended meetings, consulted widely, run an online survey, given presentations and invited written submissions.

This exploratory phase will conclude with a series of workshops in late April — RSVP now to secure your place and have your say!

We have reached the widest part of the diamond shape in the diagram — it represents the half-way point for the process. Now we are entering a stage where we begin to refine our ideas based on what we have learned and the feedback received.

In early May we will hold a series of focus groups and other meetings to review all the input received and start drafting the 10-year strategy.

A draft document will be released for comment by the University community in early June.

Once finalised, the strategy will be submitted to an approval process that includes the Commission’s Steering Committee, Academic Board and University Council. An implementation plan will be submitted to the Planning and Budget Committee’s mid-year conference.

First, we are hosting two student-staff consultation forums. Hosted in lecture theatres that seat up to 200 people, these events are a chance for you to ask questions about issues raised in the consultation paper.

The first student-staff consultation forum will be held at lunchtime on Tuesday 15 April 2008 — see the main Information Futures Commission web site for details and to RSVP for this event.

Second, we are inviting students and staff to participate in an exploratory workshop during the week Wednesday 23 April to  Wednesday 1 May 2008.

The workshops are organised around the strands of the triple helix:

• research and research training
• learning and teaching
• knowledge transfer

There will also be two workshops about the student experience — how students find, use and share scholarly information, and what kinds of services and support they expect from the University.

Members of the Expert Panel will attend the workshops, and the conversation will centre around the role, value and potential  strategies for scholarly information and technologies to support the triple helix.

Workshop seats are strictly limited — register early to secure your place :-)

You’re not alone!

In our conversations with peers and colleagues, the Information Futures Commission project team are often asked, “Where’s your evidence?”

It’s a natural question: we are, after all, working in an academic environment ;-) Because it’s good business practice, the Commission wants to make evidence-based recommendations about policy and strategic directions for the University’s scholarly information.

Big spreadsheets of benchmarking statistics, trend data or survey results are often hard to read and understand.

In an effort to stimulate conversations — and remind ourselves of nifty ideas — Mark, Linda, Sally and I have started collecting our favorite factoids and turning them into an online slideshow.

We will be updating the Fabulous Facts slideshow at least once a week during April and May. To see the current version, visit the Fabulous Facts page on the Information Futures Commission web site — share, comment, tag and enjoy!

Comments submitted without a valid email address will not be approved.

Please see this blog’s comments policy for details.

There are other ways for you to comment or contribute to the Information Futures Commission. The comments policy page provides some suggestions, and more details are available from the main Information Futures Commission web site.

This weblog is intended to be a group effort. As a student or staff member of the University, you are welcome to become an Information Futures blogger — click the link for details.

Answer: This is a phrase you will often see or hear in relation to the Information Futures Commission. We use the phrase to describe four types of information:

1. Published information and collections used by our scholars to inform their learning, teaching and research. Published information and collections may be in many formats and may or may not be provided through the University. Of particular interest from a planning perspective are the information and collections the University (normally through the library but not always) negotiates access to or collects. These include books, refereed journals, maps, monographs, images, DVDs and videos, audio recordings and other physical materials. Increasingly information is produced in digital format and we are seeing a growing tension between free access and market-driven models of publishing. The term ‘scholarly information’ also refers to other primary sources typically collected by a library, museum or archive: for example letters, financial documents, mementoes and other contents of personal and business archives; or museum collections of instruments, samples or other objects.
2. Materials created for learning and teaching purposes. These could include, for example, course notes, presentation slides, customised ‘packs’ of selected readings for a particular subject, audio and video versions of lectures, and a range of digital objects that can be stored in a learning management system and reused in different ways and at different times.
3. Information created in the course of research activities. Examples of such information are numerical data collected from scientific instrumentation and laboratory work; information collected from surveys, interviews and other social studies; records of meetings and conversations between collaboration partners; models, plans or images created in the course of design, architectural or ethnographic research.
4. Research outputs such as papers, chapters, monographs, articles, letters, presentations, posters, demonstrations and speeches, processed research data, visualisations of large datasets, models, web sites and multimedia objects. Information produced for the purposes of community engagement can be considered a subset of this category.

The second part of the phrase is about technology. We cannot separate a discussion of our plans for scholarly information from a discussion of the underlying information technologies, given the inter-connectedness between the information and the form in which it is used.

Scholarly information technologies include the tools, systems, infrastructure and processes by which we create, identify, manipulate, classify, index, store, preserve, search, retrieve, deliver and use scholarly information.

New technologies are evolving rapidly — not only in the online world but in the built environment, requiring reconceptualisation of learning and teaching spaces, libraries and social spaces. With new technologies and ideas come new expectations for physical spaces, for how we design, inhabit and reconfigure them to fit a variety of purposes.