T-shirt logo for Ada Lovelace Day 2010 - click for details.

…to Female Science Professor, a researcher at a large US university who blogs about working in physical sciences, an academic field dominated by men.

…to Rachel Webster, Professor of Astrophysics at the University of Melbourne, a leader of the Square Kilometre Array telescope project. Received a Nature award for scientific mentoring in 2006 and helped introduce the Women In Physics program at Melbourne, increasing the number of female students in that field. Added to the Victorian Honour Roll of Women in March 2010.

…to Elizabeth Blackburn, the Australian Nobel Laureate (2009) who co-discovered telomerase, an enzyme that replenishes the the telomere, a structure at the end of chromosomes that seems to be involved in ageing.

…and to the microbiologists, metalworkers, engineers, physicians, chemists and the many other working women listed in the Australian Women’s Register.

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This post was written for Ada Lovelace Day, 24 March 2010, an international celebration of women in science and technology. This event was founded by Suw Charman-Anderson - yay, Suw!

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Given an essay topic, for example, you start with optimism, confident that some useful information will emerge from your initial search. As you acquire facts about the topic you start to feel swamped, faced with too much information and uncertain about how to make sense of it all. Then you start to analyse, joining pieces of information together and forming your own ideas about the relevance and value of the data, perhaps drawing some conclusions. At this stage, your confidence returns and you feel relief at having found a viable way to tackle the topic.

Kuhlthau illustrates the parallel emotional and cognitive changes that occur during the search process: she calls this the Information Search Process model.

Kuhlthau et al (2008) have reviewed more than 30 studies relating to some aspect of the Information Search Process model, and themselves conducted a new study with 574 school students. They conclude that the Information Search Process is generally sound as a theoretical model and as a practical framework for identifying when to intervene in a student’s learning process.

Other observations from their literature review:

• boys tend to gather and complete, while girls prefer to investigate and formulate
• girls tend to start with optimism and end with doubt; whereas boys tend to be more confident as they complete the research process
• in a digital environment, students tend to assume information will be readily available; the search process tends to end because of deadlines rather than because the original question has been answered satisfactorily, and students’ sense of relief is related more to task completion than to a successful learning outcome
• in educational settings, and particularly when online resources are involved, people tend to skip the early stages of planning their research; however, time spent on refining the topic and developing a research strategy has been shown to produce less frustration and a smoother transition from information-gathering to synthesis and acquisition of knowledge
• “When the model is used as a framework for guiding inquiry, students move away from simply collecting and compiling information to please teachers; rather, they become involved in thinking processes that require extensive exploration of ideas and formulation of thoughts before developing their own deep understanding of their topics and presenting it. By allowing time for reflecting and formulating while they are exploring and collecting information, they avoid missing the critical stages of learning.”
• “If students are aware that increased frustration and anxiety is to be expected mid-way through the construction process they become less discouraged when it happens… Teachers and librarians who guide students through inquiry projects can emphasize this for students and be ready to intervene in helpful ways.”

Except for the last two points, which are quotes from the article, the note above are my interpretation of the article’s findings. What catches your eye in the original paper?

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Reference

Kuhlthau, CC, HeinstrÖm, J and Todd, RJ (2008). “The ‘information search process’ revisited: is the model still useful?” Information Research, 13(4) paper 355. Available at InformationR.net/ir/13-4/paper355.html

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• information-intensive scholarship
• data-intensive scholarship
• distributed scholarship
• collaborative scholarship
• multidisciplinary scholarship

Collectively, these are known as e-scholarship practices. They are types of academic behavior. They are not descriptions of the tools or technologies used in that behavior.

If academic librarians and IT staff are to provide appropriate collections and infrastructure, they need to understand e-scholarship and plan accordingly. Borgman suggests this is best achieved with library and IT strategies that “focus less on the technology per se and more on advances in scholarship and learning—that is, strategies supporting the ’scholarship’ in e-scholarship.”

This was an important element in formulating a set of principles to support the Scholarly Information Strategy recently adopted by the University of Melbourne. We knew that, because of the rate of change happening in technology and society, the strategy itself would need to be updated every few years. In designing the principles, we wanted to provide a decision-making framework that would last unchanged for a decade.

References:

Christine L Borgman (2008) “Supporting the ‘Scholarship’ in E-Scholarship” in Educause Review, volume 43 number 6, November-December 2008, pp32-33.

Christine L Borgman (2007) Scholarship in the Digital Age. MIT Press.

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Most Australian universities have an online repository of their research papers, articles and theses. Some have adopted a policy of requiring academics to add their finished documents to these repositories (copyright and publishers’ contracts permitting, of course).

Striking an attitude of well-meaning befuddlement, Lane identifies an opportunity for institutions that are keen to improve the public impact of their research. In general, I agree with him; Australian universities don’t do much to promote their eprints repositories as sources of free learning. Thus far, we’ve tended to leave the repositories in the hands of librarians, computer programmers and occasionally to the advocates of so-called e-research.

By recognising eprints as valuable information assets, and treating them as we would other business assets, we could substantially improve the levels of public awareness of, and access to, the brilliant research being done across the country.

It ain’t rocket surgery. For starters it would be relatively simple to:

• provide a link from the main university home page
• provide a link (or even a search box!) from the university library’s home page
• feature new Open Access publications in the “news and events” section of the institutional web site
• include repository contents in results from the university search engine
• link repository records to the online staff directory and to the web pages that profile individual staff members
• as Melbourne University has done, link the repository records to the “find an expert” list that’s produced mainly for the benefit of journalists and prospective PhD researchers
• track and publish statistics on the finding and usage of those Open Access documents

What else could you suggest? How could your institution make more use of its eprints?

If you work in a large company, could you find a similar use for the articles, white papers and other documents your people produce?

How could you link people and systems to streamline the procedures for collecting and using this kind of information?

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Submissions to the Inquiry are now available online.

I’m reasonably pleased with the Melbourne University document (PDF 1.2 Mb). M’colleague Sally and I were able to gather some useful input from well-informed people on very short notice — observe, if you will, the lengthy list of acknowledgements at the back of the document.

More than one of the contributors raised a wry grin when I told them we couldn’t publish the University’s submission on the University’s web site — we were obliged by the Inquiry’s terms of reference to wait until the official version was published on the Parliament web site. (This was an inquiry about access to *public* information, after all!)

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The Commission delivered three key documents to the University community:

1. Final Report of the Steering Committee, describing the consultation process, summarising what we learned, and analysing the major areas of contention
2. Melbourne’s Scholarly Information Future: a ten-year strategy (”Zis iss ze big vun,” as Otto von Chriek might say)
3. Implementation plan, including a budget proposal and a governance proposal

The Final Report was noted by the Academic Board and University Council. This now becomes part of the University’s official records, providing information about why particular decisions have been made.

The Scholarly Information Future strategy was endorsed by both Academic Board and Council. This makes the strategy an official part of the University’s planning and reporting framework. The strategy describes what we want to do, and by when.

The implementation plan was presented at the annual Planning and Budget Conference where money is allocated for the forthcoming calendar year. (So yes, there is a six-month lag between approval of budget and the appearance of actual money on the (virtual) table. Previous experience has shown that much can happen in those six months — universities are very political organisations.) The implementation plan describes how we will make the strategy’s aspirations into realities; the governance model specifies who will be responsible for achieving the desired outcomes.

Decisions are made outside the committee room

Getting a new strategy, governance model and funding proposal approved is not simply a matter of writing the documents and sending them to the relevant committee secretaries. The real decisions of committees and boards are made outside the boardroom.

With the Information Futures Commission, we had the perfect project sponsor — a CEO who is adept at engagement with both ideas and people, who has a reputation for getting things done and who carries great personal credibility within the organisation.

We also had a project leader who combines expertise in her professional fields with a strong emphasis on finding the best possible outcome for everybody involved in a given situation.

Within the project team, we rehearsed many different ways of telling our story. These rehearsals influenced how we wrote the final documents, how we talked at meetings and forums, the selection of examples and anecdotes for presentations. We drew pictures on our whiteboard, we stuck flurries of Post-Its to the walls, and we talked across the partitions at least every half-hour (or whenever inspiration happened to strike). This verbal and visual creativity also provided a fair bit of laughter for the project team, and free entertainment for members of other project teams who worked in nearby cubicle pods.

Eventually some concepts and language became canonical — we reached a rough consensus about how we wanted to express our ideas to others — and this informed our discussions with the Steering Committee.

Throughout the life of the Commission, our sponsor and our leader each spent quite a bit of time and energy on meeting with individuals and groups, explaining the strategy and answering questions about what it means for the University. This intensified in the last two months, as the deadline for decisions drew nearer.

We also called on members of the Steering Committee, and other senior stakeholders, to add their voices to the general conversation — to talk with their colleagues and peers about adopting the strategy, to find money for its implementation.

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Public submissions are invited from individuals, groups and organisations. Submissions close on Friday 22 August 2008.

The Inquiry has produced a 50-page Discussion Paper that explores some of the questions and issues to be addressed. In particular, they are considering:

• potential risks, costs and benefits of maximising the availability of Victorian Government information for commercial and/or non-commercial purposes
• whether the currently-available licensing models, such as Creative Commons, would be appropriate and useful for publishing government information

(I have paraphrased from the terms of reference. If you’re thinking of making a submission, you should read the Discussion Paper yourself — just in case I’ve misinterpreted something.)

We tackled some related questions in the Consultation Paper (February 2008) for the Information Futures Commission.

In November 2007 Nat Torkington pointed to some US and UK initiatives, including a campaign by The Guardian (newspaper) to Free Our Data — ie, to persuade the British Government to make public data publicly available.

What are the practicalities of doing such a thing? Geographic and demographic data are obvious candidates for this kind of public release: what other kinds of government information could be made available, and how might people use it?

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This September I will be presenting a short (30 minute) session at Oz-IA, a case study based on the Information Futures Commission.

Session title: “Developing a business-led information strategy”

In it, we’ll run briskly through a strategy development process that:

1. takes an holistic approach covering several information ‘domains’
2. is founded on business needs and priorities (enterprise architecture)
3. is informed by external trends, developments (business intelligence)
4. and balances organisational needs with individuals’ requirements and perspectives (user research)

Because the Oz-IA audience is mainly people who work on web sites and applications, I’ll focus on how we used several standard user-experience research methods in the strategy development process.

If you have any questions you’d like me to address in this session, leave a comment below or send me an email.

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Partly as a result of contacts we made via the boss’s US study tour, we can now announce that Australia has joined the SCOAP3 Open Access initiative that aims to make the top refereed journals of high-energy (particle) physics freely available to anybody who wants to read them.

Six of the Group of Eight universities have agreed to participate in the consortium: Melbourne, Sydney, Adelaide, Western Australia, New South Wales and the Australian National University. The Australian partnership will be coordinated by the University of Melbourne.

SCOAP3 members are high-energy physics funding agencies and laboratories, leading national and international libraries and library consortiums. They represent the USA, more than a dozen countries in Europe and the multinational European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN) — and, now, Australia.

With the accession of Australia, SCOAP3 has received pledges for one-third of its budget. Once it is fully subscribed, SCOAP3will make a tender offer to the current publishers of high-energy physics journals. The publishers would be guaranteed operating money to cover the cost of editorial work. In return, the publishers would make the journals freely available to the entire world.

With increasingly powerful IT and communication technologies, the pace of discovery in high-energy physics has increased immensely. Communication among researchers occurs mainly through arXiv.org, an Open Access repository of working papers and pre-print versions of articles. With arXiv, researchers can learn about new discoveries within 24 hours.

However, the top refereed journals remain essential to the scholarly communication process. The peer-review process helps to ensure the quality of published scholarly work. A small number of the journals are used in measuring research performance.

The SCOAP3 partners hope to ensure that the top peer-reviewed journals maintain their integrity while remaining financially viable.

Allowances are made for developing countries that are unable to pay their share.

Australia produces 0.6 per cent of high-energy physics articles, an amount that will be covered by the contributions of the six participating universities.

(This is a shortened version of the media release, which I also wrote. Thanks to media officer Rebecca Scott for helping to spread the word.)

• PhysOrg.com published the full article on 7 July 2008.
• Eigenfactor.org list of top physics journals, based on 2006 citation data.

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