Overview of the
5th Roundtable of the National Scholarly Communications Forum,
Canberra, 21-22 October 1996Overview of the
5th Roundtable of the National Scholarly Communications Forum,
Canberra, 21-22 October 1996The 5th Roundtable of the National Scholarly Communications Forum was held in Canberra on 21 and 22 October 1996. Entitled Information, Innovation and Scholarly Communication, the Roundtable was attended by 95 participants from Australian, British and New Zealand universities as well as representatives from state and federal government departments.
Invited speakers included Professor Brian Fender, Chief Executive of the Higher Education Funding Council for England, and Professor John Arbuthnott, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Strathclyde and chair of the Joint Information Systems Committee. Four other members of JISC also attended.
The participation of the British contingent permitted a review of Government activities and funding in the United Kingdom and facilitated a comparison with Australia. As a consequence of the Joint Funding Councils' Libraries Review conducted by Sir Brian Follett in 1993, significant allocations have been made to the development of the infrastructure considered necessary to support the information needs of the British scholarly community. This support has included the development of the communication networks, Janet and SuperJanet; consortium provision of data sets; exploration of initiatives such as electronic publishing and the encouragement of information literacy training.
These activities have been largely parallelled in Australia, although with significantly less resources. Some activities have been funded through ARC Infrastructure grants but the main coordination has been through the Standing Committee on Information Resources established by the AVCC. In 1993, $5 million was allocated from the National Priority (Reserve) Fund for library infrastructure projects involving data sets, network infrastructure and electronic publication. The projects comprising this programme will be concluded in 1997.
It is difficult to identify particular outcomes of an event such as the Roundtable as it was not convened to solve specific issues but rather to facilitate communication between interested parties. Probably the major result of the Roundtable was an in principle agreement to foster collaborative projects between Britain and Australia. The first of these projects commenced prior to the Roundtable and involves the development of software for transmitting scanned images of documents from a library direct to the email account of the requesting individual. This project involves libraries in Australia, Great Britain and the United States. A second project, involving the development of interlibrary loan management software was identified subsequent to the Roundtable. Further opportunities for collaboration, especially in the sharing of data sets and the better use of print collections, are under consideration.
An important outcome of the Roundtable was the dissemination of information about the work being done in Britain to plan for the future. The Joint Information Systems Committee has released several discussion documents including Guidelines for Developing an Information Strategy and Exploiting Information Systems in Higher Education. These documents have stimulated debate about the future of scholarly communication infrastructure in Britain which is not yet prevalent in Australia. At the Roundtable, delegates were provided with copies of two discussion documents - Australian Scholarly Information Infrastructure : issues in resource sharing and development by Australian universities published by the Council of Australian University Librarians and the National Library, and Exploiting Information Technology in Higher Education : an issues paper published by the Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee. Both papers seek to identify issues affecting the support of scholarly communications and to provide suggestions for future action.
The National Scholarly Communications Forum and the Roundtables are important to the continuing debate about support for research in Australia. By providing opportunities for a range of interested parties to meet and discuss issues, the Forum is broadening the debate and involving policy and decision makers, academics, librarians, technologists and other participants such as publishers and authors.
Updated 26 November, 1996