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.

The Library regularly collects statistics about its activities. For example, we know how many items are checked out every year from the Legal Resource Centre – click the image below to see a larger version of the graph.

Another example: we know that in the week ending 4 August 2006 library staff received 197 telephone enquiries, of which 55 per cent were about loans or other library-related topics.

See more circulation statistics (intranet web page — UniMelb access only).

Some statistics are difficult to collect. We know how many people come into our 19 library branches each year. It’s harder to estimate how many of those people are students or staff of this University, and how many are either from other institutions or have no connection with the University of Melbourne (except that they wanted to use our library :-)

Because we want to make well-informed decisions, the Information Futures Commission will be looking for more evidence of this type — the more the merrier! We’ll also be looking for data about staff and student use of IT for scholarly activities.

So… over to you. What specific questions should we be trying to answer with statistical evidence?

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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.

Answer: The Libraries Committee chair, Professor Janet McCalman, is a member of the Steering Committee for the Information Futures Commission.

While questions about how we should develop and manage our library collections, facilities and services are important, the Information Futures Commission’s scope of inquiry is the broader area of ’scholarly information and technologies’.

For the work of the Commission, we are proposing 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.

Answer: A number of people have asked why we don’t just put out there what we think the answer is and invite comment? We have always had in mind that we shouldn’t approach this process with a pre-conceived vision. Discussions so far with a range of stakeholder highlight the wide range of possible future visions. We need to get the questions and background out there for discussion by you, our community.

So – the Consultation Paper to be released at the end of February will outline some of the big issues and ask the university community to start engaging with them. Following this there will be more papers that provide background in specific areas, Academic Board and other committee discussions, guest speakers at Information Futures and other public discussion forums, and of course the opportunity for everyone to contribute via the blog.

Please get involved! Only through engagement with our community will we arrive at a strategy that is bold and realistic in taking the University forward.

Question: Are we going to look at the great things that the academic community is already doing in order to move our vision forward?

Answer: “Yes…but”. The answer is that of course we will be intensely interested in what is going on and will be interviewing a range of those doing innovative things in the creation, dissemination, access, preservation, and curation of scholarly information. If you have innovative things you’re doing please let us know or (even better) put them on the blog so that everyone can hear about them.

The “but” is that we are also attempting to look 10 years ahead and will need to ensure that we don’t constrain ourselves to the what is out there now – no matter how innovative.

Answer: You can download a one-page summary statement (PDF 20 kb) outlining the scope and purpose of the Information Futures Commission.

In summary: the Information Futures Commission will develop a 10-year strategy for the University ’s scholarly information and technologies.

The work of the commission will build upon Growing Esteem, the broader University strategy adopted in 2006. Growing Esteem provides the logical foundation for a re-conceptualisation of the University’s information strategy and plans for the next decade.

What do these changes mean for our libraries? For our teaching and learning spaces? For our research infrastructure? For our information and communication systems and infrastructure?

Here are some more specific examples. The final report might include recommendations about:

• principles for deciding when the University should collect and when it should connect to other institutions’ resources
• a strategy for support services relating to information literacy and information-seeking behavior
• prioritising of physical and virtual spaces for scholarly information
• expected standards and attributes of technological infrastructure or services to support scholarly activities
• models and concepts describing how scholarly information is used in different disciplines, and how best to support this for learning, teaching and research

The Commission will not make recommendations about questions such as:

• how people in the University should teach (pedagogy)
• how we should undertake research
• design of ‘research spaces’ such as laboratories and other specialised facilities
• organisational structures
• specific technologies

For more information, please visit the Information Futures Commission’s main web site.

Question: How will the Information Futures Commission seek input from the University community?

The summary project plan outlines the different ways in which University students and staff can participate in the Information Futures Commission.

We also welcome feedback and questions from outside the University. Please feel free to use the ‘comments’ facility on this weblog, or contact the project team directly.

Each week, we will post a few questions (and our answers) on this blog.

Question: Where can I find a copy of this document? Bridgland, A., Brodsky, M., Kealy K., Page, H., Yeoh, A. 2007, 10 Year Space Plan for Collections, Corporate Records, Library and IT Services 2008-2017.

Answer: The 10-year Space Plan is available from the Information Services intranet web site. We have provided a link from the Key Reference Documents page on the Information Futures Commission’s web site.

Question: Will there be discussion about the accessibility of technologies selected for essential activities such as Learning Management System, the student portal, SuperSearch and the new student administration system?

Answer: The project team is keen to hear proposals about how to address equity and access issues as they relate to scholarly information and technologies. The Commission’s web site provides information about submitting a response during the consultation phase.