There have been significant changes in the world, and within the University, since the original Growing Esteem 10-year strategy was adopted in late 2005. The “Refining Our Strategy” consultation process is an opportunity to review progress thus far, and to fine-tune the University’s priorities for the next 3-5 years.

The University Library will make a written submission to the review, and we need your help to do it.

Library staff are invited to attend an introductory forum today, 2.00 pm to 3.00 pm, in the tutorial room, ground floor, Baillieu Library. At this session we will identify which aspects of the discussion paper the Library ought to address in its response.

• View the presentation slides from the 11 June forum (Microsoft Powerpoint 1.2 Mb)

Over the next few weeks there will be other opportunities for you to contribute to the Library response.

To stay in touch with what’s happening, subscribe to this blog’s RSS feed or keep an eye on the Information Futures home page.

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

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.

In late April we will facilitate a series of exploratory workshops to frame the broad objectives of the strategy. Participants will examine draft statements outlining possible strategies and their implications informed by an understanding of Growing Esteem aspirations, external changes, our existing capabilities and feedback to date. These workshops are themed around the strands of the triple helix.

In early May focus groups will look in more detail at the actual things we would like to implement, including what these would look like in practice and how they might make Melbourne a leader in the provision of, and support for, scholarly information. These focus groups are themed around the key areas likely to be affected by our strategy – people, content and collections, and infrastructure (physical and virtual).

If you’d like the opportunity to discuss your views with small groups of others, we would encourage your participation in an Exploratory Workshop or a Focus Group.

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.

The feedback from those who attended this event was overwhelmingly good — guest speaker Rhys Francis was rated as “excellent” for his knowledge of the subject, his presentation style, the content of the presentation and the relevance of the topic to the University.

Rhys provided an entertaining and provocative insight into the changing nature of knowledge and its implications for the IT infrastructure we will need for doing research in the next 10 years.

This is what we broadly call “e-research” — the use of information technology to create, analyse, manipulate, store, distribute and preserve data that is created in the course of doing research.

This is my favorite slide from Rhys’s presentation — click the thumbnail image to see a bigger version.

The Y axis is global population — 2000 is 2 billion people, 4000 is 4 billion, and so on.

The X axis is a timeline starting at the year 1000 and going to 2400 and beyond.

The graph shows that the growth in global population was relatively flat until the 19th century. It then started increasing rapidly. Predictions are that the world’s population growth will flatten again at around 10 billion, some time in the next 100-200 years.

Rhys suggested that today we are in the midst of both a population explosion and an information explosion. Western cultural heritage, as captured in recorded information, has developed slowly in the last 400 years.

With the advent of mass communication, and in particular ubiquitous digital and mobile technology, the amount of recorded information is growing rapidly. A study published by UC Berkeley estimated that print, film, magnetic and optical storage media produced about 5 exabytes of new information in 2002.

Five exabytes is enough to:

• digitise the contents of the US Library of Congress 37,000 times
• store (as text) all sentences ever spoken in human history

(Telephone calls would have added 17.3 exabytes of new information, if stored in digital form.)

In 2002, new information was growing at a rate of about 30 per cent each year. Today, it is even faster. The recently-released EMC2-sponsored study by International Data Corporation (IDC) starts its executive summary with some gobsmacking statistics:

• The digital universe in 2007 — at 2.25 x 1021 bits (281 exabytes or 281 billion gigabytes) — was 10 per cent bigger than predicted in 2002.
• The resizing comes as a result of faster growth in cameras, digital TV shipments, and better understanding of information replication.
• By 2011, the digital universe will be 10 times the size it was in 2006.
• As forecast in 2002, the amount of information created, captured, or replicated exceeded available storage for the first time in 2007. Not all information created and transmitted gets stored, but by 2011, almost half of the digital universe will not have a permanent home.

Rhys Francis suggested that physical limitations on digital storage and transmission will slow the growth of recorded information, at about the same time as global population growth slows.

In summary, our scholarly environment cannot be used as a predictor of the scholarly environment 50 or 100 years hence. In Rhys’s words:

We just happen to be living at the most exciting time for any researcher. There’s more researchers than there ever has been before, and it’s growing. There’s more capability in IT and computing and data than there ever has been before. We’re better connected than we ever have been before.

But all these things are going to flatten out and the future researcher is actually going to be working in a continuous model of the world rather than an exploding model of the world. Our thoughts are not going to drive what they need, and we need to be aware of that. So aren’t we glad we’re alive?

If we’re alive now, in our lifetime we’re going to see an increment to knowledge that’s incredibly large compared to the total knowledge. In the future, the researcher is going to see in their lifetime an increment to knowledge that’s a small increment compared to the total knowledge, and that increment could go down. The problem the researchers have got is “How much of this [knowledge] can you actually know? How effective can we be when we are swamped by knowledge and information?”

Well, I’m excited :-)

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 :-)

This consultation paper outlines:

• changes in society and scholarly practice that affect how we value and manage our scholarly information
• the history, size and resourcing of our current scholarly information environment
• some questions and choices we now face about what to do with scholarly information and technologies in the next 10 years

You can download the consultation paper from the main Information Futures Commission web site — though, of course, it’s actually stored in the University’s ePrints repository.

There is also a ‘commentable’ version of the paper available here, on the Information Futures blog — to start reading it, click the Consultation Paper link in the “Pages” section of the right-hand menu. We look forward to seeing your comments on the blog pages :-)

Tomorrow, Friday 29 February, we are issuing a public call for submissions in response to the consultation paper. Yes, keen web readers, you heard about it here first :-)

In the next three months, students and staff and alumni will be invited to participate in a range of consultation activities: forums, workshops and so on. You don’t have to be a member of the University community to contribute to the conversation — no matter who you are, if you’re interested in the University of Melbourne’s future or in any of the issues raised in the consultation paper, we want to hear from you!

The award recognises “significant and influential contributions to the development of computer-mediated communications and to the empowerment of individuals in using computers and the Internet.”

Michael was a keynote speaker at the VALA 2008 conference in Melbourne earlier this month.

We at the Information Futures Commission were delighted to welcome Michael to the Melbourne University campus, where he delivered the second Information Futures Forum lecture for 2008 — a video of Michael’s presentation is available online.

Missed the forums? No worries — you can ‘attend’ online instead. Videos of both the forums are now available on the Information Futures Commission’s main web site.

We started the forum series with Richard Katz, Vice-President of EDUCAUSE. Richard explored the disruptive effects of information and communication technologies on higher education — from how we communicate routinely with colleagues to questioning the fundamental notion of ‘the university.’

The second Information Futures Forum was presented by Professor Michael Geist of the University of Ottawa. Michael is a leading advocate of providing open access to scholarly information, and an expert on copyright law. I could not attend Michael Geist’s lecture, Unlocking Access – the case for Open Access publishing, so I’m looking forward to hearing what he had to say.

Huge thanks to Jon Peacocke, Ian Shiel,  Ben Loveridge and the rest of the Digital Media Services team for their fabulous video recording and production work.