Progress report: period ending 31 March 2008
Actions and achievements
A successful research-focused Information Futures Forum was held last week with a presentation by Dr Rhys Francis, Coordinator of the NCRIS Platforms for Collaboration. If you have time it is well worth a look – the presentation is available online
Information Future thinking/planning is now taking place at three levels:
- A survey is now available on the web to allow individuals to contribute information about how they create, find, use and manage scholarly information and how they would like to in the future. Anyone can choose to complete this. This is linked to a database and we’ll use a textual analysis tool to process the results. MDHS has decided to use this extensively across all Faculty academics and the adjuncts in research institutes and hospitals as input to their Faculty thinking/planning.
- Each Dean is being contacted to nominate a lead for the Faculty Information Futures planning. A draft Faculty planning framework has been developed and is currently being refined with input from Peter Harris, the MDHS representative. It is planned to complete these documents with a small working group of Faculty folk, including students, and with input from relevant Information Services staff (predominantly the relevant discipline librarians working with the IFC team). The planning framework will be modified to better reflect the need to elicit information about where Faculties work across Faculty boundaries. These templates will be complete by the end of April and will inform the whole of University strategy.
- A set of principles to inform the Information Strategy is being developed for consideration at the next Steering Committee. For each principle we have extracted the planning assumptions and possible consequences of application of the principle. It is intended that this form a policy overlay through which we can draw together submissions, Faculty and individual input.
At the next Steering Committee it is proposed that the two main items for consideration are:
- benchmarking and other metrics to inform our understanding of current inputs, processes and outputs and how we compare, nationally and internationally
- Principles and consequent planning assumptions for discussion and endorsement subject to re-testing against submissions and other planning input.
A short presentation was given to Academic Board on the Information Futures Commission.