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!

Wesch gave an hour-long illustrated talk at the US Library of Congress in June, an anthropological introduction to YouTube. It’s packed with challenging ideas about identity, authenticity, social cohesion — and joy, lots of joy. Two examples of the joy: Blimvisible’s “Us“  and Gary Brolsma’s “New Numa” dance. (Wesch video found via Laurel Papworth’s silkcharm blog)

There’s yet more Wesch goodness from the University of Manitoba, which has streaming video of his lecture about using social media for teaching. If anybody could make Twitter, Google Apps or Facebook into a useful part of the learning process, you’d think it would be Wesch and his students. In fact, some social media work well and some don’t work at all (in an educational context).

In particular, the project aims to:

“Envision, identify, and promote integrated online environments for higher education that: simplify knowledge creation, storage, organisation, publishing, collaboration, outreach, and access, beyond the classroom, and across media and devices.”

The IKE project site is hosted on Google Sites. They are using a blog, del.icio.us tag, wiki and other ’social software’ to invite input from anyone who shows an interest — hey, it could be you!

“Teens write a lot, but they do not think of their emails, instant and text messages as writing. This disconnect matters because teens believe good writing is an essential skill for success and that more writing instruction at school would help them.”

The report is based on a national phone survey of 700 Americans aged 12-17 and their parents. It was conducted by Pew and the National Commission on Writing.

Co-author Amanda Lenhart comments in a media release that “There is a raging national debate about the state of writing and how high-tech communication by teens might be affecting their ability to think and write… Those on both sides of the issue will see supporting data here.”

Richard Sterling, executive director emeritus of the National Writing Project, said “We think these findings point to a critical strategy question for all educators: How can we connect the enthusiasm of young people for informal, technology-based writing with classroom experiences that illuminate the power of well-organized, well-reasoned writing?”

Full text of the Writing, Technology and Teens report is available online.

The New Media Literacies project at MIT takes what we might call an ‘embedded’ approach to teaching information literacy:

“How does digital copying relate to legacy notions of property? What do I need to know in order to collaborate with my online peers? How do I present myself online? What do I do when I encounter new communities with unfamiliar norms or ideas? In many cases, there are helpful analogies in “age old” practices. Nevertheless, the conventional wisdom of the analog world can seem like an ill fit. A more appropriate approach might frame the core skills and ethical issues within already established structures, but recognize the complications and opportunities of the contemporary media environment.”

At Harvard, the Good Play project:

“…seeks to understand the ethical issues that youth face in the virtual frontier of new digital media. How models of ethics transfer from the offline to the online world–especially in the five areas of identity, privacy, authorship and ownership, credibility and participation–and how young people understand their roles and responsibilities in digital contexts are key concerns.”

The two project teams met recently to share their experiences, and a summary was published on Henry Jenkins’ blog. Their blog post includes three examples of group exercises that help students work through concepts of responsibility, copyright and privacy.

The report also points to Spotlight, a group blog that publishes weekly articles about “what’s important” in the emerging field of digital media and learning.

The New Media Literacies project is building a ‘learning library’ and looking for partners, collaborators and contributors — see the NML web site for details.

Related posts on this Information Futures blog:

• Literacy, old and new
• Information management at a personal level
• Regardless of age, everyone googles

This 15-minute questionnaire asks students, staff and other scholars to describe, in their own words, how they find, use and share scholarly information.

In part, the survey was inspired by Danny Kingsley’s PhD research at the Australian National University. By surveying almost 300 academics Danny identified discipline-specific differences in how academics find and publish scholarly information.

The table below is based on my notes of a presentation given by Danny at the VALA 2008 conference. The full text of the refereed paper is available from the conference web site.

Will we find similar patterns among students and academics at the University of Melbourne?

The Outstanding! survey will be online until Friday 9 May. It takes about 15 minutes to complete, and we’d love to hear your voice. What’s your experience of finding and using scholarly information?

If all the current barriers disappeared and you were working or studying in an ideal environment, what would that environment be like? How would it feel? How would you do things differently from today?

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?

• what’s your experience of finding, accessing, using and sharing scholarly information?
• what would that experience be like in an ideal future, say 10 years from now?

Take our 15-minute survey and let us know!

Results of the survey will be published by the Information Futures Commission and used to inform discussions during April, May and June about a scholarly information strategy for the University of Melbourne.

Credit where it’s due:

• Michael Wesch’s videos were a source of inspiration for this survey
• Several of the survey questions were inspired by the work of ANU PhD candidate Danny Kingsley — see her VALA 2008 conference paper (PDF 80 kb) for details about identifying information-seeking differences across academic disciplines
• Many thanks to Guy Sangwine (Enterprise Applications) for his help with constructing and running the web version of the survey. Love yer work, Guy :-)

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?

I am anxious that a paper, originally recommended to me by Pip Pattison, be shared as widely as possible in the academic community and among those involved in the IF Commission.

The document is a draft paper (2007) by Andrew Abbott on “library research as a form of computation.” It is available from the ‘books and papers’ list on Abbott’s personal web site.

The Information Futures Commission’s Consultation Paper quotes from this document, and from other works by Abbott, who is a sociologist at the University of Chicago.