University of Melbourne Vice-Chancellor Glyn Davis opened the conference. He spoke for 15 minutes and for the next three days other presenters kept quoting his remarks.

Glyn mentioned:

• Clark Kerr, a long-serving President of the University of California, who was criticised by Ronald Reagan as a ‘dangerous liberal’ for his stance on free speech and political protesst. Kerr wrote memoirs about his time at UC and a survey of the higher education and research landscape called “The Uses of the University.” Managing universities “is not for the fainthearted.”
• Geoff Garrett and Graeme Davies’ book “Herding Cats: being advice to aspiring academic and research leaders.”
• Deregulation of student numbers; some Australian universities increased their student numbers by one-third this year.
• Crown Casino is largest employer in Melbourne, universities are second and third largest
• Education is the largest export industry in Victoria.
• Only 23 per cent of Melbourne University’s income is sourced directly from the federal government: in Europe, Melbourne’s funding balance would see it classified as a private institution.

Rather, those are the questions you answer in hindsight, once the business is running and you need to demonstrate success. Those are the questions Poirot asks rhetorically in the drawing-room as he explains how the crime was committed.

When forming a business strategy and a plan, you need to ask different kinds of questions: the kinds of questions Poirot asks in order to solve the case, questions about why and how and what’s missing from our understanding of the situation. Venkat at Trailmeme explains:

“…Real questions, useful questions, questions with promising attacks, are always motivated by the specific situation at hand.  They are often about situational anomalies and unusual patterns in data that you cannot explain based on your current mental model of the situation… Real questions frame things in a way that creates a restless tension, by highlighting  the potentially important stuff that you don’t know. You cannot frame a painting without knowing its dimensions. You cannot frame a problem without knowing something about it. Frames must contain situational information.”

Because of their inherent structure — small panels of art presented sequentially to tell a story — comics are a natural fit for new technologies like phones and iPads.

Creators and publishers are already finding ways to provide an enriched reading experience through these devices. What hasn’t yet emerged is a business model that will pay for the sustained development and production effort — unlike a novel, a strip comic never reaches “The End”.

This unusually candid blog post describes the process and the financial returns of expanding one of the web’s most popular strips into new mobile apps.

Photo, above: Steampunk Jewelry made by CatherinetteRings - image by Catherinette Rings Steampunk, CC-licensed

What futurists actually do:

“Even though we can’t predict exactly what will happen, we can make reasonable assumptions about what potential futures might look like, and in doing so we can begin to make choices today that can help us bring about the changes we hope to realize in the world.”

Managers of strategy and planning also do this.

Another thing we do is try to ask the right questions, ones that will help the business to be successful.

These are not the right questions:

Who is our customer?
What is our market?
What is our goal?
What problem does our product solve for the customer?

Those are hindsight questions: you need to know their answers in order to keep your business running, but they will not help you understand your particular situation and what needs to change.

Before you can answer formulaic questions like the ones above, you need to ask and answer some insight questions:

“…Real questions, useful questions, questions with promising attacks, are always motivated by the specific situation at hand.  They are often about situational anomalies and unusual patterns in data that you cannot explain based on your current mental model of the situation…  Real questions frame things in a way that creates a restless tension, by highlighting  the potentially important stuff that you don’t know. You cannot frame a painting without knowing its dimensions. You cannot frame a problem without knowing something about it. Frames must contain situational information.”

Instead of asking “How can I be happy?” try examining the factors that contribute to the state (or situation) of happiness. By answering the question “Are people with strong friendships happier than loners?” you identify a possible course of action.

Making Public Records Public: Why open formats are essential for sharing and preserving government data - image by opensourceway, CC-licensed

The British government is seeking comment on its draft principles for the transparent management and release of public-sector data.

The same agency, data.gov.uk, is developing a framework for licensing of selected government information.

In these areas the UK seems to be one or two steps ahead of Australia, although similar themes emerged from the Victorian government’s inquiry into public-sector information and have been discussed at the Federal level here.

At the University of Minnesota a MyLibrary portal provides personalised content based on a user’s relationship with the university — their academic department and degree program or employment position. The personalisation is based on an ‘affinity string’ generated by the university’s enterprise authentication system. Librarians have access to anonymised data about users’ behavior online, allowing improved collection management and service delivery.

Stuart Weibel (OCLC) notes that “The MacArthur Foundation, among whose fundable ‘causes’ is credibility in online information, is funding the start up costs of the Reference Extract project, that the New York Times characterized as “Google if built by librarians”.” The project’s leaders are David Lankes (Syracuse University), Jeff Penka (OCLC) and Michael Eisenberg, emeritus Dean of the University of Washington’s Information School. (I *love* the photo on Eisenberg’s home page.)

Weibel describes the ‘research question’ that this project may be able to answer:

“Librarians have been known to turn up their collective noses at open search, impugning the quality of search results, and a plethora of online dross bolsters the position.  But it is mostly good enough for most of us, most of the time.  Will reference-librarian links improve that quality?

“It might be more useful to think of librarian-vetted links as another cut on relevance ranking… useful primarily in circumstances when ‘good enough’ is not quite good enough.  Still, such results are more likely to live comfortably within existing search environments, rather than in competition with them.”

.

References

Scott J Simon (2008) “Information Architecture for Digital Libraries” in First Monday, volume 13 number 12, 1 December 2008. Available at firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/view/2183/2059

Cody Hanson, Shane Nackerud, and Kristi Jensen (2008) “Affinity Strings: Enterprise Data for Resource Recommendations” in The Code4Lib Journal, issue 5, 15 December 2008. Available at journal.code4lib.org/articles/501

Similarly, the Dilbert strip for 21 December 2008 has a particular resonance for me — and perhaps for others who work in large organisations? I recently worked with a colleague on compiling a history of the last decade in IT/library management at our organisation: the IT part of the publication looked very much like the list of milestones in this cartoon.

A report in the Guardian reminds us that effective project management isn’t as easy as it looks. A UK Department of Transport computer integration project was supposed to save over £50 million. It ended up costing more than £80 million and delivering less than £40 million in operational savings. As well, the new system failed to meet most of its performance targets. Ouch.

• 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.

The aim was to show how well-known IA techniques can be applied to a different type of project, in this case a strategy development project.

There had been some discussion in earlier sessions about how to get started in an information architecture career, and about developing a strategic approach to doing IA work. My presentation, towards end of the second day, seemed an apt time to suggest that a solid set of IA skills can take you in new career directions.

Many thanks to Roger Hudson for the generous loan of his computer.

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!)