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).

Here are a few factoids that illustrate how the impact of a cultural institution like the BBC might be measured.

The Guardian reported earlier this month that “The BBC’s digital media services, now grouped together in the future media and technology division, had a budget of £182m during the last financial year, up from £153.7m for 2006-2007.” These figures come from the BBC’s 2007-08 annual report.

This month the Beeb published Pricewaterhouse Coopers’ research “into the economic impact of the BBC’s publicly funded services on the UK broadcasting and creative sector.” The PWC report found that the BBC creates value of “approximately £6.5bn per annum or more than £5bn in the creative sector alone,” is a major provider of training and investment stability for the UK’s creative industries and drives competition and regional development in the creative sector. If the BBC were replaced by a commercial broadcaster, the report says, Britain would lose around £4.4bn of economic impact. (source: BBC Internet blog 22 July 2008)
In 2007 the main BBC web site saw 33 million unique weekly global users including 12 million British adult users per week. More than 16 million BBC podcasts were downloaded in the month of March 2008. (source: BBC Internet blog, 11 July 2008)

The BBC Trust says the Beeb should be a “trusted guide” for Internet users. In a series of blog posts, former BBC.co.uk staffer Martin Belam analyses the Trust’s recommendations about search; on links to external web sites; and on embedded content.

Now the Beeb has appointed Roly Keating as its first Director of Archive Content “with responsibility for maximising public access to the BBC’s invaluable archive of television, radio and multimedia content.” (tip o’ the hat to the BBC Internet blog for this link and quote, and for the quote below)

The BBC TV Archive web site provides more information about digitising and making available this uniquely deep, rich collection of stuff.

In an introductory video Adam Lee remarks:

“We’ve got about 4 million physical items for TV and radio. That’s equivalent to 600,000 hours of TV content and about 350,000 hours of radio. So we’re getting very close now to a million hours of material. We also now have a New Media archive, which is keeping a record of the content that goes out on the BBC’s websites. We also have large sheet-music collections, we have commercial music collections. We have press cuttings going back 40 years as well. So it’s a very large-scale operation.”

How might a university demonstrate its public value? Accepting the maxim that “you value what you count,” what sorts of things should we be keeping count of — the number of books in our libraries, the dollar value of our cultural collections, how many people visit our exhibitions? And what else?

The site explains why Open Access publishing is beneficial to academic researchers, teachers and students, and how to find appropriate avenues for publishing your academic work.

The project was developed by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) and is supported by the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL). These are all USA-based organisations.

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!

From Eigenfactor’s home page you can also search for a specific journal and find two numbers that describe the journal:

• Article Influence (AI): a measure of a journal’s prestige based on per article citations and comparable to Impact Factor.
• Eigenfactor (EF): a measure of the overall value provided by all of the articles published in a given journal in a year.

Eigenfactor is a research project sponsored by the Bergstrom lab in the Department of Biology at the University of Washington.

The Information Aesthetics blog describes Citespace as “a powerful network data visualization technique that facilitates the detection of emerging trends & transient patterns in scientific literature. CiteSpace is based on 2 concepts: ‘research fronts’, defined as an emergent grouping of concepts & underlying research issues & ‘intellectual base’, the network of citations & co-citations of a research front in scientific literature. the size of a node is proportional to the normalized citation counts in the latest time interval.”

Created by Chaomei Chen at Drexel University, Citespace is Java-based and rather less user-friendly than Eigenfactor (by which I mean you have to download the software and feed it some data in order to produce a pretty picture), though it seems to have potential as a visual analysis tool.

Videos are now available on the Information Futures web site — follow the links below. Each presentation is 20-30 minutes long.

Blackboard’s Regional Manager, Tony Macguire, talked about the changing expectations and behaviors of our students, particularly younger people who are part of the Net Generation. Blackboard is a major component of our online learning management system, LMS+ (pronounced “Ell Em Ess Plus”).

Simon Phipps is the Chief Open Source Officer for Sun Microsystems, and we were lucky that he happened to be visiting Australia at the right moment. As Sun is a major supplier of computer hardware, you might expect Simon to talk mainly about data storage and servers. No, indeedy — Simon talked about changes in society, in politics, in business practices, in how people interact with each other in everyday life. (For background about these ideas, try reading The Cluetrain Manifesto and Small Pieces Loosely Joined.)

Richard Siegersma, Executive Chair of DA Books, spoke enthusiastically about the exciting possibilities of new technologies for accessing books, both in print and digitally. Imagine being able to download your entire reading list onto an ebook reader at the start of semester, including textbooks, articles and extracts. And if you want a printed copy of a book or reading pack, simply place an order at the campus bookshop and pick up your nicely-bound printed-on-demand book less than an hour later. These technologies aren’t quite fully developed yet — but they’re just around the corner…

Michelle Selinger is the Director of Education in Cisco’s Asia-Pacific division. Again, you might be surprised by the content of Michelle’s presentation. Cisco is known as an IT network specialist — cables, routers and so on — but they also take an interest in what their university clients are doing. Michelle explored questions about who owns knowledge, how it is shared and acquired, the nature of authority, learning through games and rich media environments, and the meaning of “academic rigor” in this new world.

Blackwell Ltd is a global supplier of books and other library materials. Area Sales Manager Carolyne Cohn’s presentation started with some observations about the challenges facing academic libraries: currency exchange rates, declining funding, competition for space on campus, different copyright laws in different countries, the changing expectations and preferences of academics and students — I’m sure this struck a chord with many of our own library staff! Publishers of monographs and other scholarly works are responding to these challenges in different ways, and Carolyne gave several examples of new ways to provide access to scholarly information.

Crispin Blackall, Telstra’s Director of Future Technology Solutions, gave an overview of the IT industry’s growth to date. Mobile computing — via your phone, ebook reader or other portable device — is predicted to be the major change in digital communications in the next few years. The future is fast, portable and flexible. (Oh, and don’t get too attached to that keyboard — in the next 10 years you will probably learn several other ways to interact with digital devices and information environments.)

Huge thanks to Kylie Nickels, Reuchlin Teo and James Beckford Saunders for organising the Vendors’ Day.

Many thanks to everyone who submitted a written response, commented via this blog or attended a meeting or focus group session during the last fortnight.

The written submissions are available from the main Information Futures web site.

Over the next 10 days we will revise the strategy and seek further input from the University’s senior executives and from the Information Futures Commission’s Steering Committee.

The completed strategy will be presented to the 26 June meeting of Academic Board for endorsement, then to the 14 July meeting of University Council.

An implementation plan will be presented to the Planning and Budget Conference at the end of July.

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.

This quote from Professor Christine L Borgman, Professor and Presidential Chair in Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles is from the preface of her work on scholarship in a digital age.

The Information Futures Commission was formed to explore this very notion: what should we be building? The work of the Commission is to develop a strategy that positions 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.

We began by asking many questions — questions for which we knew there would not always be an obvious answer. Through the consultation process we heard many exceptional, thoughtful responses that reflect the diversity of our University community. That community has acknowledged the importance of this conversation, but also struggled with the complexity of the issues.

We begin this report by briefly describing the environment in which we operate. We follow with a summary of what we have learned from our community and from assessments of the world in which we operate and our place within that world.

We conclude with an analysis of the key points of agreement and, more importantly, the strategic questions and difficult choices. These are the matters where no clear consensus has emerged, where there will need to be informed debate and discussion, where trade-offs must be made, where the University will ultimately have to make some perhaps challenging decisions.

Attached to the Progress Report is an initial Draft Information Future Strategy. This has been developed to assist and inform the debate, drawing on all we have learned so far. The draft strategy is a starting point. Its final form will be determined by the choices we make, based upon your advice and involvement. The draft document proposes some principles to guide to the development and implementation of the ultimate strategy. The principles are followed by an example strategy for Melbourne’s information future – a strategy that seeks to ensure Melbourne can compete in a global knowledge economy by building upon its unique strengths.

This Progress Report and Draft Information Future Strategy are presented to elicit your comments, which will help to shape the final strategy that will be presented to Academic Board in June and University Council in July.

How to respond

Following its presentation to Academic Board in May this Progress Report and the attached Draft Strategy will be released for comment by the University community.

These documents and further relevant information will be available on the Information Futures web site.

During the two-week review period following the Academic Board meeting, the Information Futures Commission will convene a series of focus group sessions and host an open consultation forum for students and staff.

The review period will close on Friday 6 June 2008.

Your response to this report would be appreciated. Please leave a comment on this weblog or contact the project team directly.

The Vice-Chancellor launched the Commission in late January 2008 at an event attended by over 200 people. A month later the Commission published a Consultation Paper and issued an open call for submissions. Over 900 copies of the Consultation Paper were downloaded from the web site and 450 printed copies were distributed.

During March and April we sought ideas and input from the University community and from external stakeholders. We hosted two open consultation forums. Four Information Futures Forums featured international and national expert speakers and attracted hundreds of attendees both in person and online.

The Commission’s web site and weblog have attracted almost 7000 visits and 14,000 pageviews. Students and staff offered comments on the blog and sent emails via the web site. An online survey asked individuals to describe their information seeking and management strategies and their view of an ideal future state. The survey attracted more than 130 responses, mainly from academic staff and graduate students.

We consulted widely with individuals and discipline-related groups. Deans and senior faculty staff were interviewed and presentations were delivered at meetings of 15 faculty and University committees. Discussions were held with representatives of several external organisations and special-interest groups, including the Council of Australian University Librarians and the Council of Australian Directors of IT.

In late April six exploratory workshops involved more than 30 volunteer students and staff.

We received 72 written submissions from faculties, groups, individuals and external organisations, including a submission from University College London’s Director of Library Services, who was a recent visitor. Written submissions are published on the Information Futures web site.

The internal Expert Panel met weekly throughout this process, providing invaluable guidance, encouragement and critical feedback. We also benefited from regular contributions by Richard Katz, Vice-President of EDUCAUSE and an External Reviewer for the Commission, and early feedback from Dame Lynne Brindley, CEO of the British Library.
In total, more than 300 people participated in the initial consultation phase.

This report heralds the second stage of the Commission’s work, in which we synthesise what we have learned and offer an initial draft of an Information Future Strategy. This report and the draft strategy will be released for comment by the University community following the May meeting of Academic Board. In May and June 2008 we will hold focus groups and other meetings to review and test the draft strategy. Input from this review process will be used to further refine the strategy.

The improved strategy will be presented to the Commission’s Steering Committee, Academic Board and University Council for final review. An implementation plan will be submitted to the Planning and Budget Committee’s mid-year conference.