Student-staff consultation forum, 4 June 2008
Students, staff and other members of the University community were invited to participate in an open consultation forum:
12.30 pm Wednesday 4 June 2008
Theatre 2, Alan Gilbert Building
Agenda for the forum:
- Short presentation by Commission leader Linda O'Brien, introducing the draft Scholarly Information Future strategy
- Q&A, discussion (see notes below)
- Next steps: endorsing the strategy and starting the detailed planning
This forum was not filmed; there is no online video available.
Notes of the Q&A section
Can you give examples of how people see the library?
Some academics say they need a central library, but others are saying a digital library is important, not the place.
How much do students socialise and collaborate and how much study is done in the library?
According to the survey we conducted, only a small proportion of students use the library to socialise or collaborate. They mainly go there to research or photocopy material. Academics see libraries as places of quiet study.
Is the cohort across disciplines?
Different faculties handle it in different ways. For example some, but not all, faculties are trying to build cohorts for new gen programs – sometimes as social groups and some for learning. There may be problems for students who have families and jobs. So is the cohort aspiration worth hanging on to? This needs further debate.
The debate seems to revolve around the library as a building for research and study. The shift seems to be towards students.
The message is that research through libraries requires IT professionals that understand research and know how to manage data, give advice on publishing and copyright. There is emphasis on the importance of informational professionals and research. But feedback we are getting indicates students need places and technologies and people want IS to organise information so that they can find it easily.
Is this common in US and Europe? Students wanting one thing, academics another?
Yes, it is common world wide. We need tools and structures for global environments for some disciplines, but not others. We have a commitment to make it easy to move between these environments and help others to understand their values including digital and print collections.
Do we find solutions or do we collaborate with other universities to solve these problems?
At this moment, Sendur Kathir is in Paris attending Project Bamboo - a multi-institutional, interdisciplinary, and inter-organisational effort that brings together researchers in arts and humanities and information technologists to look at how we can advance arts and humanities research through the development of shared technology services. Some collaborations work, others fail.
Undergraduate students are finding it a big stumbling block to understand LMS and Supersearch. How do we overcome the problem of getting information to students? It isn’t the job of lecturers to teach them.
It is up to the university to provide resources and skills to its staff to provide a good learning experience.
There is a problem of scale – most students don’t go to a librarian to ask questions, they are often reluctant.
There is a need for information professionals to understand the environment and provide basic skills.
The music faculty recognises that students might not ask questions. There is a huge range of understandings for first year students – how to write a bibliography, how to spell, different educational backgrounds etc. We give a specialised tutorial to cover a raft of different issues – eg how to access items on the reading list, how to access IT, how to answer questions in assignments etc. It is only one hour, but it gives students a taste and provides a human face to the library.
Some faculties provide this attention, but others don’t. The challenge is how to do this in the new environments – breadth and depth. Some principles are the same, but others are unique to specific subjects. We need to understand the structures and think through how we are going to do this for some of the new gen programs.
Students should learn how to spell etc before they start university – we need a bridging program to bring them all up to the same skill level.
There is a study skills program – we need to partner more closely with this program.
Instead of a Band-Aid fix, we need more friendly IT programs. It is evident to me that students are not as computer savvy as we think they are. It is superficial, not academic. Eg LMS seems unfriendly, so students give up. He has also found that students have actually wanted print, not ebooks.
We don’t seem to know enough about what our students want or need. Academics want ebooks & journals, they are convenient and can be accessed anytime, anywhere. But they also want print. I have talked to MUB about a print on demand service. This will allow students to print a copy at a reasonable cost, better than photocopying and convenient.
Students use the excuse that they couldn’t get ready for a tutorial on Monday if the information has to be accessed from the www – system crashes, etc.
Students find creative ways to get out of work. In the past, students had to go to the library, but now they want information 24/7 – immediacy matters. We use information from non-refereed publications as waiting for refereed reports takes longer. It will interesting to see how this changes the system.
Thanks to Lynda Gilbert for taking notes at this forum.