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 :-)

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.

“[T]he archetypal image of a university is a community of scholars clustered around a library, drawing on and adding to a growing archive of codified knowledge…”[2]

Melbourne’s future is defined through the metaphor of the triple helix: a public-spirited institution defined by tightly-bound strands of research, internationally recognised teaching and continuous knowledge transfer, each reinforcing the other. Binding these strands is the process of scholarly communication: the creation, evaluation, synthesis and dissemination of knowledge through scholarly information.

It is therefore entirely appropriate that, following the work of the Curriculum Commission, we explore the place of scholarly information in realising our commitment to being one of the finest universities in the world.

Melbourne has rich collections of printed scholarly publications, cultural materials and archives befitting a university of its age and stature. Yet our ability to collect even a fraction of what is currently published is overwhelmed by the sheer volume of production, by escalating costs and by our ability to manage, make accessible and maintain such collections. And whilst the Internet has the potential to make knowledge more widely available, competitive pressures are encouraging greater protection of intellectual property and copyright. Digital content does not guarantee that access will be free. The vast amount of information becoming available in digital form creates the paradox of overload and challenges our capacity to locate and preserve relevant, high-quality information.

The fates of research libraries and universities are inter-twined. Disruptive technologies challenge the practice of scholarship — changing the ways in which knowledge is created, sparking opportunities for new forms of synthesis and dissemination and making possible new ways of learning. The boundaries of the helix are blurring.

In 2008 the Information Futures Commission will engage the University community in a critically important discussion — a consultation process that will shape a 10-year strategy to position the University as a leader in the application of scholarly information and technologies to underpin next-generation research, teaching, learning and knowledge transfer, binding the strands to achieve the Growing Esteem vision.

I look forward to your participation in this conversation.

Professor Glyn Davis
Vice-Chancellor

How should we develop our scholarly information and technologies, services and infrastructure to achieve our research, learning, teaching and knowledge transfer aspirations over the next decade?

Rapid and unpredictable changes in information technology mean that we will need to reconsider this question every few years. But a changing environment is not an excuse for inaction. Rather, it calls for deliberate choices to be made. By not making choices we risk a dilution of effort, we risk finding that poor planning forces us into continually trying to bridge the gap between our aspirations and our ability to deliver,[3] we risk falling behind our competitors in attracting and retaining the best academics, the best students, the best professional staff.

Our initial consultations and research have identified a multitude of possible responses to the underlying trends and challenges we face. Yet we cannot do everything. The work of the Information Futures Commission is to engage the University community in making what will be difficult choices.

This Consultation Paper aims to stimulate a vigorous conversation among members of the University community and with relevant external stakeholders. For the purposes of this conversation we propose that ‘scholarly information’ has four dimensions:

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.

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.

Over the next few months, in consultation with the University community and stakeholders, the Information Futures Commission aims to:

• Understand how we create, use and communicate information in our individual scholarly activities
• Consider how we wish to make our scholarly output available to and usable by others
• Imagine our preferred future state and:
  • Identify the approach we wish to take to collecting or connecting to information
  • Determine what technologies, systems and infrastructure we must access or provide
  • Define the preferred characteristics of our physical spaces (teaching spaces, learning spaces, libraries)
  • Develop a strategy to build the capabilities of our staff and students to find, evaluate, create, share, present, use and manage scholarly information effectively in a digital environment

The release of this paper will be followed by a broad-ranging consultation process. In June 2008 the Commission will produce its final report proposing a 10-year strategy for our scholarly information and technologies, a strategy which will require the University to make some choices. Some of these choices will require courage and a willingness to leave behind some of our dearly held practices and assumptions so that we may embrace bold new opportunities in the future.

Staff and students are invited to attend discussion forms, consultations and the Information Futures Forum series of lectures to be delivered by Australian and international experts.

The Information Futures weblog provides a venue for informal conversation. All interested individuals, both within and outside the University, are welcome to add their comments.

More information about the consultation process is available from the Information Futures home page.

In responding to this Consultation Paper, we encourage all staff and students to conduct their own discussions and concentrate on the issues most relevant to them. Colleagues should get together to work out their response and proposals, which need not be confined to the questions raised in this paper. Critical perspectives, creative ideas and robust solutions are most welcome.

Your response by Friday 9 May 2008 would be appreciated.

Leave a comment on this web version of the Consultation Paper or email your written submission to info-futures@unimelb.edu.au

“Collaboration, across time and space, is the fundamental method of scholarship, and without it we can do nothing of value.”[4]

This section of the Consultation Paper explores six topics:

1. Repositories of human wisdom and knowledge
2. A networked world: new ways of seeking, understanding and using information
3. Disruptive change: university engagement with the Net Generation society
4. The changing nature of scholarly practice
5. The university in society
6. The future

The amount of information published each year continues to grow. More than 3000 books are published daily, with an estimated 3.1 billion books published in 2006, an increase of 0.5 per cent on 2005 figures. A new weblog is created every half-minute; 50 million blogs were created in the second quarter of 2006. Podcasts, videos, machinima and digital archives further expand our information sources, and 2.7 billion Google searches are performed each month.[7]

What happens to the role of the university and the role of the library when we live in a digital world, a world where almost everyone can publish, almost everyone can access this published material, where the amount of information is growing exponentially? A world where there is an illusion that information is free, where public search engines, Open Access publishing and the increasing ubiquity of Internet-enabled computing have challenged the traditional sources of authority? A world where “The scarce commodity is no longer the information itself, which is often free, but the time and skills to use it well”?[8]

Members of the Net Generation have been described as being digitally literate; connected; attracted by the immediate and experiential; social, team-oriented; interested in structure, engagement and experience; visual and kinaesthetic in their learning styles, and concerned with ‘things that matter.’[12] Although originally these were seen as attributes only of those born after about 1992, more recently both general technology research organisations[13] and more specific studies in the field of scholarly information[14] posit that many of these assumptions are not in fact age-based. However, these and other studies[15] have also determined that technology usage and expectations are influenced by a range of factors including social background, discipline, gender and role.

For the Net Generation, technology is both determinative and recursive: while it changes our routine work and study habits, we also expect to change the technology itself by adapting and repurposing it to do new things. Thus shared mobile telephones are used for e-commerce in Africa[16] and web applications that are based on collective knowledge and popularity form the basis of successful 21st century businesses.[17] These uses also highlight a cultural element to the digital shift — the Net Generation has come to expect a ‘beta test’ mentality, with rapid development of products and services, and trial and error learning — a different culture from that in most university libraries and IT areas which have traditionally focused on delivering more robust products and services, more slowly.

Perhaps most profoundly for universities, there is a move to more collectivist and democratic methods of creating and sharing information. This is exemplified by Wikipedia, a free online encyclopaedia that is ‘built by the masses’ and yet rivals the centuries-old Encyclopaedia Britannica in accuracy and certainly exceeds it in circulation.[18] The Internet has created an unprecedented ability to collaborate among friends or strangers, and among personas that are real or virtual.

Today’s ‘new generation’ undergraduate students have grown up with the Internet. Google and Wikipedia are their first choices for information seeking, ahead of the library’s collections. Arriving in a university environment, the Net Generation encounters academics and libraries that pay credence almost exclusively to scholarly sources of information. As a marker of change, Wilder (2005) notes that if a new student today “were to use her library’s website with its dozens of user interfaces, search protocols, and limitations, she might with some justification conclude that it is the library, not her, that needs help to understand the nature of electronic information retrieval.”[19] From the institution’s perspective, “In a media-saturated age, how does a university help students navigate their way through oceans of information to islands of knowledge, and from there to the getting of wisdom?”[20]