M’colleague Michael asked this week whether the Information Futures Commission has identified any recent-ish equivalents to itself at other universities.
A related question has come up several times in the last couple of months. When we ask a senior stakeholder for an opinion about what issues the Commission should tackle, the response is often,”Well, what are other universities doing?”
Scope of the Commission
The Information Futures Commission is developing a 10-year strategy for how the University of Melbourne deals with four kinds of scholarly information:
- Published information and collections used by our scholars to inform their learning, teaching and research, for example library collections, archives, museum and gallery collections.
- Materials created for learning and teaching purposes, eg course notes, presentation slides, customised ‘packs’ of selected readings for a particular subject, audio and video versions of lectures, and a range of digital objects that can be stored in a learning management system and reused in different ways and at different times
- Information created in the course of research activities, eg numerical data collected from scientific instrumentation and laboratory work; information collected from surveys, interviews and other social studies; records of meetings and conversations between collaboration partners; models, plans or images created in the course of design, architectural or ethnographic research.
- Research outputs such as papers, chapters, monographs, articles, letters, presentations, posters, demonstrations and speeches, processed research data, visualisations of large datasets, models, web sites and multimedia objects. Information produced for the purposes of community engagement can be considered a subset of this category.
As well as the information itself, we are looking at the technologies that we use to find, create, store, deliver, manipulate and distribute that information. And when we say ‘technologies’ we mean everything from library shelving systems to wireless Keepad clickers in classrooms.
What about those Joneses?
Some universities have rethunk their libraries recently — UC Berkeley and the University of Texas are good examples of this.
Many US and European universities are reviewing their IT functions and moving towards a shared-services model. This often involves adopting an ITIL framework for the delivery of IT services.
Support for e-research — large-scale computing, data storage and management etc — is not yet commonly tackled as part of a larger “library plus IT plus…” agenda. (Though I think Monash is leading the Australian way in how to provide information management services and support to researchers.)
As far as we are aware, no other anglophone university is looking at all four (or five) areas in an holistic manner.
Similarly, we haven’t found another library that is explicitly taking the larger organisation’s strategic/business goals as its starting point for a review. The library reviews that we’ve heard about tend to start with the observation that “library users’ practices are changing, so the library needs to change too.”
Asking the right question
Is the Information Futures Commission doing the right thing?
In the consultation phase of the project we have posed questions that are relevant to Melbourne University at this point in its history. Many of those questions won’t be relevant for other universities, because they arise from Melbourne’s particular strategic goals and ambitions.
Are we insanely ambitious? (Perhaps just insane?)
Will others follow our lead? (Do we care?)
Are we breaking fruitful new ground?
It seems there are no ‘right’ answers, no robust precedent to follow, no ‘best practice’ guidelines that we can use as a checklist for this project.
Instead we have designed a broad consultation process that seeks input from many sources and stakeholders. We will rigorously test the assumptions we make and, wherever possible, base our decisions on good evidence.
Ask me in 10 years whether we got it right :-)
Tags: e-research, strategy, project management, Information Futures Commission, scope, university
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