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?

• 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 :-)