Responding to feedback collected last year from students and staff, our fabulous Library Systems team spent this summer making changes to SuperSearch and the online catalogue.

From the start of Semester One 2009, searching for a journal article or library book should now be much easier and faster. We have also created links between the catalogue and other systems so that, if an item is unavailable at Melbourne, you can easily request an inter-library loan without abandoning your current search.

There are a few problems we can’t yet fix. For example, you may still need to retype your password occasionally when using SuperSearch – but we have significantly reduced the number of times this is likely to happen.

Students, staff and alumni can access SuperSearch and the Library catalogue directly from the Library’s home page, or via the Learning Management System (LMS). The main catalogue is also available to the public.

Bouquets, comments and suggestions for further improvements are always welcome – email  info-futures at unimelb.edu.au to let us know what you think of the SuperSearch and catalogue searches.

The Library Systems team can help you become a ‘power user’ of the University Library’s online catalogues and resources.

The group’s Library IT Tips (LITT) blog offers advice on using library systems, discussions about new features, and tips and tools for improving your Library search-fu. Add it to your feedreader or visit regularly to find out what’s new.

Feel free to comment on any posts of interest to you — the Library Systems team would love to have your feedback!

In fact, the Information Futures Commission is interested in much more than text-based materials.

For example, let’s consider the image as a piece of scholarly information. In this post, I will describe two types of ’scholarly image’ — you can probably think of many more.

Image as illustration

Twenty years ago, a lecturer in literature might have used photographic slides, posters, prints or photocopies from a book — perhaps even a short section from a VHS video tape — to illustrate a lesson about the medieval Bayeux Tapestry. Our libraries, museums and archives still collect those types of materials, and our researchers and teachers still use them.

Today, though, the ease of digital access, manipulation and presentation is proving a winner in the classroom. A Melbourne Uni English Literary Studies lecturer, Stephanie Trigg, blogged recently about using digital sources in a lecture about the Bayeux Tapestry.

She described a process that’s familiar to thousands of academics in many different disciplines: search, find, evaluate, select, copy, manipulate, present and interpret. In Stephanie’s case, that process was entirely digital. I expect it was also faster and easier than it would have been 20 years ago — yet the quality of imagery and learning (for the students) in 2008 was probably equivalent to, or better than, in 1988.

Image as investigation

Another example of ‘image as information’ is in the burgeoning field of visualisation, the visual representation of a dataset.

As desktop computers have become more powerful in recent years, semi-automatic visualisation tools have also proliferated. Think, for example, of the Chart Wizard in Microsoft Excel — a basic visualisation tool that produces charts and graphs from a financial or statistical spreadsheet.

Real estate agents typically provide floor plans and 3D images on their web sites, allowing you to take a virtual tour of a property before you decide to inspect it in person. These are visualisations, as are the virtual models produced for by architects and landscape designers for their clients. Elevation drawings, floor plans and site maps convey design and construction details in a visual, graphical medium.

High-performance computing facilities have become incredibly powerful in recent years, due to advances in hardware technologies, bandwidth and programming methods. Pharmacology researchers can now create digital visual models of how novel drugs interact with certain types of molecule, pre-testing many different drug designs before they embark on traditional methods for drug development involving animal and human testing. Some universities teach specialist subjects in biomedical visualisation.

The University of California, Berkeley developed an open-source software platform, called BOINC, that runs distributed computing projects such as SETI@home and Einstein@home. These projects divide massive datasets into small chunks that can be downloaded, processed and returned to a central store automatically by your desktop computer — whilst you continue to work uninterrupted on other tasks. All these projects include an element of visualisation.

You may have heard of mashups — the practice of combining two or more data sets to produce new information, meaning or affordances. Again, these often include visualisation as an aid to understanding. Here are a few examples:

• John Snow’s cholera map, an early example of combining geographic information with medical records in order to understand a disease’s spread through 19th century London
• Google Maps, which combine GPS data, tagging, street maps, satellite photos, driving directions and other data sources (affordances galore!)
• the various projects produced in response to the Washington Post Remix initiative in 2006 — combining RSS feeds with data from Amazon.com, the US Congress Votes database and other sources; other US newspapers have produced mashups using geographic data, crime statistics and other newsfeeds
• flickrvision, which overlays Google Maps with geotagged photos from Flickr.com

At ReadWriteWeb.com, Sarah Perez offers an excellent annotated list of tools for visualisation — follow her links to see many inspiring examples of data turned into graphs, charts, images and animations.

So… why does the IFC care?

Most of the images I’ve described here can be, or become, scholarly information:

• when used for teaching
• or included in class notes or other ‘learning objects’
• and possibly created, modified or adapted by a student as part of a project;
• or used as input for research,
• created as part of a research activity
• and distributed to colleagues for comment;
• or published in a refereed journal article, textbook or monograph,
• analysed in an opinion piece for a newspaper or magazine;
• or acquired as part of an archive, library or museum collection
• and then digitised and published online…
• …and so on…

The scope of the Information Futures Commission goes beyond IT, and beyond libraries.

Questions for you

In the Consultation Paper we examined how changes in society, technology and scholarly practice are driving us towards new ways of understanding and managing our scholarly information.

• Did we identify all the major external changes that could influence our thinking about scholarly information and technologies? What did we miss?
• Have we made some assumptions that need to be challenged? Where did we stray?

This month, they passed the million mark. The commemorative web page provides information about the digitisation project:

• a PDF showing the steps involved in digitising a book
• presentation slides explaining the size and shape of the digitisation project
• photos of the library staff who are involved in the project
• a description of the millionth book, which is about 19th century astronomer Maria Mitchell
• links to the online catalogue and the project web site

The digitisation effort is part of a partnership between Google Book Search and several leading university libraries.

1. Size: Number of pages recovered from four search engines: Google, Yahoo, Live Search and Exalead.
2. Visibility: Total number of unique inbound links external links, based on results from Yahoo Search, Live Search and Exalead.
3. Rich files: Number of PDF, Postscript, Word and Powerpoint documents published, based on results from the four search engines.
4. Scholar: Number of papers and citations in Google Scholar.

Based on this ranking, Melbourne University is 6th in Australia and 128th in the world for the online profile of its research output.

Restricting the comparison to institutional repositories, our ePrints repository ranks 157th in the world. (what is an institutional repository?)

Webometrics is an initiative of the Cybermetrics Lab, a research group belonging to the Centro Superior de Investigaciones Científicas (CSIC), the largest public research body in Spain.

From the About Webometrics page:

The Web covers not only only formal (e-journals, repositories) but also informal scholarly communication. Web publication is cheaper, maintaining the high standards of quality of peer review processes. It could also reach much larger potential audiences, offering access to scientific knowledge to researchers and institutions located in developing countries and also to third parties (economic, industrial, political or cultural stakeholders) in their own community…

We intend to motivate both institutions and scholars to have a web presence that reflect accurately their activities. If the web performance of an institution is below the expected position according to their academic excellence, university authorities should reconsider their web policy, promoting substantial increases of the volume and quality of their electronic publications.

Given our relatively low ranking, does Melbourne need to change its approach to making research output available online? How committed are we to making the outcomes of our research freely available?

What level of rigor, if any, do we wish to exert in verifying the quality of what is published on University servers?

What is our commitment to making the underlying research data accessible to support our research? Our teaching? Our knowledge transfer obligations? If the research data is of national or international significance, who will ensure its long-term preservation and access? How will this be funded?

I’d love to hear your thoughts on these curly questions — just click the ‘comments’ link below and start typing!
(tip o’ the hat to Library Intelligencer for the Webometrics link, and to the Information Futures Commission project team for the list of questions)

In other words, we are all members of the ‘Google Generation’.

Scholarly activity happens in many different kinds of places. Perhaps the most obvious is the library building.

What does a library look like? Here are photos of two libraries that look like giant bookshelves: temporary construction hoarding around the Cardiff (Wales) library; and a more permanent decorative wall in Kansas City, Missouri (USA).

The Nonist provides 14 photos from Candida Höfer’s book, Libraries, showing quite a traditional style of library: multitudes of old books, galleries overlooking reading rooms, and so on.

Things are changing in the world of library design: just look at the variety of topics on the UK Designing Libraries web site. The list of resources on the Libris Design site covers a similarly broad range of topics, from signage to acoustics. The Whole Building Design Guide describes some typical attributes of an academic library and outlines the design considerations that arise from these. All three of these sites are intended for people who plan and (re)develop physical library spaces.

Among my webby/designer colleagues, the renovation of the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh has become a well-known (and admired) example of user-focused design techniques being applied to both physical and virtual spaces. In particular, the team of architects and design consultants spent time learning about the different ways people seek, find and use information in a library.

Where else do we interact with scholarly information? What kinds of physical spaces do we need on campus to encourage and enhance that activity?