This post as a general invitation to you — student, staff or member of another university, as we want to hear what you have to say about “Reviewing Our Strategy,” the Growing Esteem consultation paper released in late May 2009.
To comment on the dicussion paper, or on any aspect of the Library’s involvement in the University community, simply click in the box below and start typing.
Please remember that we do have a blogging/commenting policy for this blog.
The Library has begun the process of developing a collaborative response to this important document.
The team co-ordinating the response will be making regular posts to the blog.
On 29 May the Vice-Chancellor released a discussion paper, Refining Our Strategy, and invited collaborative responses from staff, students, alumni and other stakeholders.
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.
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.
Recently-appointed Philip Kent today impressed a crowd of more than 100 staff, students and Friends of the Library when he delivered his inaugural lecture as University Librarian.
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:
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
The capture and storage of research data, and its preservation over time, is an emerging challenge for universities and other research institutions.
The University Library has a leading role in establishing standards, procedures and services to help researchers preserve their original data. We were therefore delighted to meet Robin Rice, who visited this month.
In a meeting with our Discipline Librarians in February, Robin shared some of her expertise in data sharing, data libraries and roles for librarians in providing data management services for researchers.
As the Data Librarian at the University of Edinburgh, Robin is the service manager for that university’s Data Library, a collection of information produced by Edinburgh scholars in the course of their research activities. Robin is also project manager of DISC-UK DataShare, a JISC-funded project to establish institutional data repositories at three UK universities.
Conducting university research often involves creating new data, processing it, analysing it and perhaps transforming it through visualisation or other methods. Modern technologies allow us to create enormous quantities of data and analysis . Once the research is completed and an article or other ‘finished’ output has been published, the original data needs to be preserved and possibly made available to other researchers in the future. Some data can be destroyed after just a few years; other information will be preserved indefinitely, just like other historical documents.
Whilst in Melbourne, Robin Rice spent most of her time at Monash University. Her presentation to the Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative (VeRSI) group is available as an MP3 (streaming or download) and presentation slides (PDF 1 Mb).