• 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 :-)

In an Ockham’s Razor talk on ABC Radio, Sydney-based science writer Peter Macinnis describes his own ‘fact fossicking’ behavior when researching material for a new book about Australian explorers:

“I wanted to look at the ways Australian explorers worked, to examine and describe what they took with them, how they used it, what they ate and drank, what medical treatments they used, and I knew this information was in the journals that all the explorers kept, and most of them published in the 1800s.

“I have a major gripe about the way new science gets into schools. Thomas Kuhn said it first but I have adopted it: new science textbooks are written by regurgitating old science textbooks, with little reference to new finds or ideas. Most scientific advances take 30 years or more to even be noted. As a textbook writer and general science writer, I’ve always tried to go back to source, even when that made me read research that caused my brain to hurt…

“Many of the gems that I gathered… were in libraries like Sydney’s Mitchell and Adelaide’s Barr Smith, but the bulk of my material came from one brilliant source, Project Gutenberg, and in particular, from the Australian arm of that organisation. Technology delivers what we need to get the full picture.

“I downloaded 5 million words of journals, all scanned, processed and proofed by volunteers. I culled to make a database of about 1 million words, 5-1/2-thousand selected passages, each linked to the explorer, a date, a source and a set of keyword codes. Explorers often called crocodiles alligators or caimans, and some used curious spelling as well. I needed the keyword codes if I was ever going to find the themes…

“Keeping it brief, I took text with line breaks, used word processor macros to format this into paragraphs, used other macros to add extra fields to my chosen passages, separated by tabs. I exported them to a spreadsheet, where more fields were added or calculated, to allow sorts and searches. Later, I used a spreadsheet to generate the Visual Basic code to convert my keyword codes to plain English, and then put that code into a word processor macro before exporting the translated codes back to the spreadsheet. I also used the spreadsheet to generate an HTML version, a full-on database and a word processor version.

“Then I could start writing…”

Library and computer science staff at the University of Minnesota have been thinking about how students create and manage a ‘personal reference library’ as they go about their scholarly work:

“Digital library users collect, enhance and manage their online reference collections to facilitate their research tasks. These personal collections, therefore, are likely to reflect users’ interests, and are representative of their profile. Understanding these collections offers great opportunities for developing personalized digital library services, such as reference recommender systems.” (Extract from “Resolvability of References in Users’ Personal Collections,” published in Proceedings of the Sixth International Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science, October 2007) (hat tip to Lorcan Dempsey)

 Amazon.com’s recommender system and Google’s AdWords advertisements use a similar approach. Automating the collection of data about user behavior is technologically straightforward; analysing the large quantities of data requires lots of computer power but again is relatively uncomplicated from a technical perspective.

University libraries already collect data about usage of collections and individual titles. The magic comes in asking the right questions about that information: of the people who read Book A, how many also look at Journal B? Does the content of Journal B have any similarities to that of Book A? Would the Book A readers benefit from being offered a ‘quicklink’ to Journal B?

Lorcan Dempsey observed in 2005 that, unlike Amazon.com and Google, university and public library systems “have low gravitational pull, they do not put the user in control, they do not adapt reflexively based on user behavior, they do not participate fully in the network experience of their users.”

The Minnesota study provides empirical evidence that investing in enhancements to library systems could provide substantial benefits to our students and academics.

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?

Anthropologist Michael Wesch made a splash in the online world last year when he released Web 2.0 … The Machine is Us/ing Us. In this short video, Wesch explores the different ways in which people are now interacting with digital information and technologies.

In an interview with John Battelle, Wesch observed that “…if we don’t understand our digital technology and its effects, it can actually make humans and human needs even more invisible than ever before. But the technology also creates a remarkable opportunity for us to make a profound difference in the world.”

To date, the first and revised versions of The Machine is Us/ing Us have been viewed just over 5 million times on YouTube.com.

Wesch followed this success later in 2007 with two further videos. In Information R/evolution, he explores “the changes in the way we find, store, create, critique, and share information. This video was created as a conversation starter, and works especially well when brainstorming with people about the near future and the skills needed in order to harness, evaluate, and create information effectively.”

In collaboration with 200 students at Kansas State University, Wesch’s third video — A Vision of Students Today — identifies some typical characteristics of today’s university students: “how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will be like, and what kinds of changes they will experience in their lifetime.”

Finally, a slight change of direction. The Medieval Help Desk sketch, from a Norwegian Broadcasting Corporation TV show, reminds us that even the most helpful scholarly technologies can be daunting and confusing when we first encounter them.