Moving from first generation to second generation institutional repository is an opportunity for Monash University Library to integrate the institutional repository into other University workflows to improve efficiency of collecting content. This paper documents a project to integrate a system to manage the examination of Doctoral and Masters Theses with the institutional repository. The outcome automatically and seamlessly integrates the passage of a thesis manuscript from submission for examination to archiving in a repository via collaboration with other administrative units and the use of API technology.
The University of Wollongong (UOW) Learning Co-Op developed an online portal to complement its physical services, providing support for the development of students’ academic, information, and digital literacies. A user-centred design process was used to identify student needs and create meaningful, relevant content. The project employed student partners to ensure the inclusion of a strong student voice, and integrated a peer-led design strategy where the student partners identified and advocated for the needs of other students. The project utilised a collaborative approach to the creation of resources and service models, working with UOW students and staff from multiple professional units.
Virtual Reality content has quickly become embedded into popular culture and everyday purposes. Interaction within a virtual environment has enormous possibilities for a number of different industries such as business, healthcare, entertainment, architecture, engineering and all levels of education. This paper will discuss the important role of Virtual Reality within higher education, and how Virtual Reality was explored as a result of a collaborated research project between the Queensland University of Technology (QUT) Library and ProQuest in an endeavour to provide high quality Virtual Reality content and resources to the staff and students within QUT Faculties and beyond.
Museums are well placed to showcase the wonder and creativity of science and provide exceptional opportunities with which to engage our audiences. The role of science museums is to tell us about ourselves and the world around us, tackling questions both ethical and philosophical – with some jolly interactives for the kids along the way. But is it really as straightforward as that? Why do so many people feel science is ‘not for me’ and how do museums overcome that barrier?
The Science Museum Group
Based in London’s South Kensington and three regional museums, is making a renewed commitment to the display and interpretation of its internationally renowned collections of science, technology, engineering and medicine. We are delivering this through a series of extensive development projects. We opened Information Age in 2014 and Mathematics, designed by the late Zaha Hadid, opened in 2016. Next to open is the extensive Medicine galleries project, opening in 2019. Spread over five galleries, costing £24m and showcasing the world-famous collection of Henry Wellcome, Medicine will be the largest medical gallery space in the world. Perhaps most ambitiously, the Science Museum Group is rethinking the way that the stored collections of all four museums are cared for and accessed. This includes a digitisation programme that will be unprecedented across the heritage sector in terms of scale and complexity.
Seeking new ways to use and interpret the collection is at the centre of all our activity. However, museum development on such an ambitious scale carries with it associated risks. How do we future-proof galleries about technology? How can we fully plan the future usage of digital in a rapidly changing world? What might happen if our visitors and users lead on curating gallery and digital content? Perhaps most challenging of all – how do we engage creatively with non-family and non-specialist audiences? We need to ensure that knowledge gained as each project completes is successfully applied to the next. This is an essential part of the programme. In this paper, Natasha McEnroe, Keeper of Medicine, shares the lessons learned by the Science Museum – and provide a sneak preview of the new Medicine Galleries.
Imagine wandering the alleyways of your town as audio stories emerge straight out from the spaces around you. Or standing on a historical site watching layers of history unfold in front of your eyes. Thanks to emerging mobile technologies stories, histories, knowledge and learning can now be directly linked to and accessed within to their physical context – as they always have been for many first nation and indigenous peoples. In this way the technologies that facilitate these experiences have the potential to fundamentally disrupt the notion of traditional libraries as much as the development of the internet.
Maggie Buxton’s presentation discusses her PhD research and community based practice using these emerging tools to re-story places and re-place stories. She will be sharing experiences and projects working across a wide range of groups including Maori, Pacifica peoples, school children and the elderly. This spiritual, social, political, developmental practice is fundamentally aimed at expanding awareness, shifting perception and generating individual and collective learning. For further information go to http://www.awhiworld.com/ & http://maggiebuxton.com/
Linked Data has been on the metadata horizon for libraries and other cultural heritage institutions for some time. While great progress has been made we are still in the early days of adopting and applying these new methodologies. Though we often think of Linked Data as a universal big data endeavor, being worked on by large entities, some of its most compelling uses are small scale bottom-up projects. For example, using Linked Data to uncover underrepresented individuals and their histories. Or utilizing it as a pedagogical platform to build new skills for current and emerging information professionals. And even thinking of Linked Data as a tool for increasing civic engagement.
We’ll explore projects like these and think broadly how Linked Data can be used in exciting ways. We will also reflect on what we can rethink during this period of transition. Data models, workflows, how we collaborate and more can be looked at with a critical eye. While Linked Data presents significant challenges it also creates important new opportunities for change and growth.
Libraries are one of the last remaining public spaces–as a result, libraries face tremendous pressures from any number of sources. What can those of us working “behind the scenes” do to advocate for ourselves, colleagues, communities, and profession? Is it possible to reconcile surveillance hungry employers with our professional ethics? Is automation coming for our jobs? Galvan will discuss the vital role technical services and library technologists play in shaping library cultures, how we resist, and the political implications of the systems, standards, and initiatives we support.
Big or small, urban or rural, every library has three critical aspects that will always affect customers: content, connection, and community.
Learn how to harness the power of traditional and emerging content needs, face-to-face connections—whether online or in-person—and community building. Putting these 3Cs to work will help your library achieve the ultimate goal: contented customers.
This presentation will explore the imperative for open data in a closing down world.
Looking to the “collections as data” movement it will evaluate different approaches to delivering and using library collections to build humanities-oriented information platforms that demonstrate the various ways making connections and following trails of information relationships can be materialised in digital environments.
Through the prism of these practical examples larger questions will be considered: What does it mean to give shape to relationships? Can we recognize the quality of relationships by their shape? And if the answer is yes (or even maybe) then what are the implications of this? For how we understand ourselves? And for how we might redress the uneven patterns of interaction and co-existence that shape our day-to-day lives?
How might data visualisations for example, uncover and bring into sight the structures of domination that underlie the worlds encapsulated by our collections? Could this approach lead us to reconsider seemingly intractable inequities as both systemic and individual; political and personal? How might library collections as data go beyond describing, or even analysing or “figuring” things out, and become instead the basis for a new type of library engagement that grapples with the urgent need for intervention?
What are we doing to enable the metadata connections outside of the library ecosystem?
How are we making web scale discovery happen?
Questions:
As a profession we give very thorough discussion to various aspects of how we connect end users with our data, be that traditional bibliographic data, additional data related to our resources, research data, or other. Similarly we have robust discussions about how we can connect machine users with our data, with machine users being the systems both inside and outside of libraries and other cultural institutions.
What do you see as the key elements of making data connective, and why? Key elements could be such things as metadata standards, technical standards, workforce capabilities, but also much more.
Discussion and debate within our ranks is extremely important, but action needs to follow. Are we doing enough to move beyond discussion and into action? If we are, what learnings can we take forward into a more connected future? If we aren’t doing quite enough yet, what do you see as the obstacles to overcome?
As practitioners, in metadata roles or not, what should we be doing now for a more connected future?
What strategies should libraries adopt to remain relevant in the changing environment and how can we work smarter with local publishers?
Questions:
The Content Roundtable will focus on the following questions with an eye to being relevant to the public and school library sectors as well as the higher education sectors:-
How can libraries respond to the opportunities and challenges that arise from Amazon now operating in Australia?
What does this mean for access to physical and online library collections?
What is the impact on purchase models and on the preferences of library patrons to use the library collections or buy direct from Amazon?
What ongoing impact will Google and Google Scholar have on how library patrons are accessing content? For example, the 2016 Elsevier annual report mentioned that transactional sales generate 27% of revenue.
