Afternoon session started with discussion around who does what. The essential point was made quite quickly that from a student's perspective they don't care who does what - they just need services and support and they ideally want it from a single place. The organisational structural divides between library, IT, faculty, learning development etc are artificial constructs that from a student perspective are pretty meaningless and tend to just get in the way. If only we could be as clear sighted.
Integration of systems - ie: VLE, digital learning resources, library systems etc etc and delivery through a single portal with single sign-on was quickly identified as a key issue. In other words SOA for learning resources and services as well as administrative services such as timetabling, loans, email etc - all delivered through a portal.
The session quickly got to the nub of the problem. Students being able to access all the information and applications they want through a single portal was described by one person as "the holy grail" for libraries and she asked the question, "If we can do it technically and everyone agrees it's want we want then what's stopping us!" - very good question.
Another participant described how they had achieved this already at a smaller college and saw no reason why it couldn't be achieved by larger HEI's. The conclusion? It's all because of politics and silo structures ....... a bit simplistic perhaps, but the debate finished with general agreement that we all just need to work together much more closely and build more trust.
I took the opportunity to plug JISC's client animation that describes SOA from an HE perspective - and does it so well (I still think this is one of the best articulations of SOA I've ever seen and is VERY undersold) http://www.jisc.ac.uk/news/stories/2007/02/news_animation.aspx
Next subject for the afternoon was metadata standards. Our group were given an exercise using two different metadata standards Dublin Core and VRA Core 3.0 - our group was obedient this time and actually did the task which involved creating metadata for a fine art print and its associated information. The interesting bit was the discussion around metadata standards themselves. There are apparently lots in use within libraries generally and these are the same standards that are also used by library HEI's . There are apparently some moves to try and create an XML metastructure to sit on top of the most commonly used meta-data structures which of course will help hugely in terms of being able to include access to information repositories in any SOA based delivery of services and information to students.
Of course the other issue is how this overlaps with metadata standards in other disciplines such as enterprise architecture, configuration management, and who knows what outside of IT - but that's for another day ...
After the tea break and we're on to learning spaces - a very hot topic for us right now with the new building happening in Cambridge.
Many of the same issues being experienced - practical and H&S problems with power supply in open access spaces, how much space to give to laptop users, balance between group working and single working spaces (interestingly demand for group working seemed much higher amongst US students (maybe the Americans just have a more gregarious learning culture?), high demand for quiet space, and the usual discussion about flexibility - to teach or not to teach in your open access spaces.
No new answers BUT did discover that the University of Colorado, Boulder Campus and University of Wyoming both have very good brand new learning spaces, so I'm going to try and hook up with their CIO's whilst I'm here and see if I can go and visit them before flying back to the UK on Sunday. It's a long shot but it would be good to see a US example of best practice given we're about to start the serious design work for our new building in Cambridge.
Also recommended was the Educause guide to developing learning spaces http://www.educause.edu/ELI/LearningPrinciplesandPractices/LearningSpaceDesign/5521. Will be interesting to see how it compares with the JISC one http://www.jisc.ac.uk/eli_learningspaces.html
The session finished with a round up of the day. The question was posed - "what is a library once you take books away?" How do you then differentiate between 'IT' and 'Library'. The point was well made that books have an historical, emotional value for many, which needs to be recognised and accommodated - for many a university isn't a university without 'real' books. Nevertheless, the reality is that a book is just another medium for information like a database or web content.
My perspective is that IT and Libraries are effectively doing the same stuff - it's just that one is coming at it with a pedagogical model and the other with a knowledge/information creation and management model which for me is best articulated in Nonaka and Takeuchi's SECI knowledge spiral model. A fun game would be to plot pedagogical technologies on the SECI model (something I had a bash at when I was interviewed for my current job, not realising of course that information and knowledge creation and management is seen firmly as HE core business and therefore not the domain of HE CIO's who are expected merely to attend to the plumbing!)
Perhaps that should be a compulsory exercise for librarians and IT people to do together to get a better insight into where the other is coming from and thereby create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts.
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