whither university information services?

University Information services are almost universally a nineties phenomenon when universities merged their computing services with their libraries.

At the time the rationale was something like this:

• Computing has moved to the desktop and increasingly we do not require teams of bearded and sandaled acolytes to perform incomprehensible acts of veneration at the console of the one big holy machine
• Computing is increasingly about access to networked sources of information be they datasets on cd-rom or resources over the network
• Libraries are also about access to information and that information is moving from the medium of dead trees to ones and zeroes.

This rationale was imperfect. It didn't consider fully the role of computing services in providing access to software for students by way of public access computer labs, the need to provide storage management and network connectivity - something which didn't really look a lot librarianship - information engineering perhaps. And of course books and journals were still printed on paper.

The gaps did show, and like a bad marriage, the real justification was often convenience. One set of administrators, one set of lab/library assistants etc.

So fifteen years on where are we?

• Journals are overwhelmingly digital. Instead of working out where to put them, librarians manage subscriptions and with their information technology colleagues mediate access. Older articles are increasingly digitised on demand. A GoogleBooks mass digitisation style initiaitive could easily result in the disappearance of pre-digital bound journals
• Books are going digital. Born digital print on demand is ideal for small volume scholarly publications, and even then print on demand is only really required for reference books. Books which are expected to be read linearly can be handled more than adaquately on an e-reader. One could imagine that librarians end up managing portfolios of e-books sourced from publishers repositories, with some form of DRM to inhibit mass piracy.
• Google Books, Hathi trust and a number of similar initiatives will solve the long tail problem, and eventually every significant text will be available electronically
• Students overwhelmingly have their own computers, usually laptops, on which they do their work. What they require is :

1. pervasive network access
2. pervasive access to resources
3. printing services (although that is changing)
4. access to some specialist applications and data

• Pervasive network access means exactly that. Free or low cost wi-fi makes everything else possible
• Pervasive access to resources - this means an authentication and authorization infrastructure that allows them access from anywhere to resources provided by their university - something which could be as simple as a reverse proxy service for journal access
• Access to an execution environment to allow them to run particular expensive or complex applications for completion of their coursework.

So, what does this mean?

• Network access is key. But there is no reason that it needs to be provided by the university directly - it could just as easily be outsourced to one of the big telcos
• Traditional in house services like email and storage can be outsourced - google in the sape of google docs and Microsoft live can provide email and storage, and that most useful of services, a collaboration environment to share documents and jointly edit them.
• Printing remains a problem but new services such as print-via-email will eventually get rid of this bugbear
• Environments like HubZero offer a shared execution environment - in HubZero essentially a shared X-windows based environment allowing people to work co-operatively. One could imagine an evolved version of this where instead of a virtual desktop one simply provides a cloud based execution space, and one that is accessed via the student portal or learning management system
• Storage, structured storage to hold all the digital outputs of the university from Master's and PhD theses through experimental datasets to collections of digitised photographs. Providing storage of course can be outsourced.

So what do we find left?

Access mediation, ie authorization and authentication to resources which are 'out there' and contract management be they for journal access or storage provision.

Yes students still need a place to work, and perhaps these redundant library buildings could be converted into comfortable beanbag filled work environments and coffee shops.

Obviously I'm being provocative. But the world is changing into something else. When I was a child there were two tv channels in black and white and they only broadcast for six or seven hours a day. Now we hardly watch tv in the old way, iview, you tube and dvr's mean we watch what we want when we want, and not necessarily content created by the conventional broadcasters.

I wrote my first program on punched cards when I was 17, and sent my first email a few years later. Phone calls were expensive, international calls prohibitively so. Foreign language newspapers arrived a week late if you were lucky, inter library loans came as photocopies in the mail, and one actually wrote letters on paper and put them in the mail.

I'm (almost) 55 now. I can read overseas newspapers from my desktop, access journals online sitting in my pajamas if I want and call people overseas with skype for pennies. Letters - well I still buy books and I have a maildrop to have packages delivered but I don't write letters any more, and I get all my bills (except for Amex for reasons too tedious to mention) by email.

The world has gone digital, and pervasively so, which means everyone expects to access everyone anywhere. After all if I can watch the ABC Australia news on my phone while sitting in San Francisco airport, why shouldn't some kid be able to do his statistics assignment from his share house?

In conclusion, university information services will shrink and change out of all recognition.

Universities will continue to flourish on the strength of their teaching and research supported by a group of information scientists and technologists who mediate access. We will no longer have big white buildings filled with books and computers.

Asian Art Museum in San Francisco

International travel is all about "hurry up and wait". Things happen an planes leave at strange and utterly inconvenient times that don't fit with any human-normal schedule. This means that sometimes you can have four or even five hour dead period - a period too long to spend at any aiport, although sometimes, when the airport is kilometres from anywhere (Narita, Dulles, Stansted, for example) it's unavoidable.

When I was recently in SF I had a significant dead period between the end of the meeting and my flight's departure. So, rather than hang round the airport, I checked in, then took myself off to the Asian Art Museum, a mere 20 or so minute ride on the BART to Civic Center station.

I must admit I don't have a strong fascination for a lot of Asian Art, except perhaps some of the hill tribe carvings and hangings from Laos, I do find the rugs and textiles from Turkey and Central Asia quite fascinating, and also the reflection of external cultural influences in the art.

Now while the NGA here in Canberra has some quite nice bits of Gandhara art from the Afghanistan/Pakistan area - basically art showing the greco-bactrian influence as a result of Alexander the Great's exploits, the Asian Art Museum in San Francisco does better with some very very hellenistic carvings of the life of the Bhudda. Some of the carvings, shorn of context, would pass for work from further west in the hellenistic world proper.

Unfortunately, as they don't let you take reference photographs, I can't show you exactly what I mean.

However there are some quite good example images from the on the museum's website [example1] [example2] which give a flavour of it. If you want to look at the rest of the gandhara images in the collection, go to the museum's website, select 'search the collection' and type in gandhara.

Suffice to say, if you're interested in this stuff and find yourself in SF with a couple of hours spare a trip to the top floor of the Asian Art Museum is worth the twelve bucks entrance fee.

What's in a name?

While by no means unique, I have a fairly unusual name - searching for Moncur on the web will usually bring up a link or two associated with me.

I don't know a whole lot about my family history save to say that my forebears were peasant farmers in Kincardineshire for at least two hundred years and that before that there were Moncurs who were armourers and that there was an Andrew Montcur who rendered homage to Edward I of England in 1296, which, at a guess, means my lot started out with one of the petty Norman nobles invited in by Malcolm Canmore during the Englishing of Scotland.

If true this would mean that the name is probably Norman French in origin. And I've always been struck by the observation that whenever I go to France, while I say Moncur to hotel receptionists and the like, the bill almost always addressed to a M. D Moncoeur, ie they instinctively Frenchify it.

Fine. People hear what makes sense to them, so even though they've seen my passport, they still write down what they think they've heard. Just the same way as my father's forename is Hendry, not Henry, simply because that's what it sounded like to my grandfather, who told the registrar to spell it that way.

Now, France I can understand. But when I was in California recently I was universally Moncour (pronounced Mon-coor). Which is a puzzle, as to why it should happen consistently to what's a relatively unusual name that I'm guessing most people in California won't have come across before ...

Leon Trotsky ...

Yesterday I mentioned Leon Trotsky in a blog post.

Havn't mentioned or thought about Lev Davidovich for years, yet his photo was one of the background images of my student years. You could even buy notepads through the student co-op store with a cartoon of Lev and his famous quote "Revolutions are always verbose" on the cover.

Of course all that has gone away. In much the same way as professors have got respectable, all that leftist fervor and energy has gone away to be replaced with an anodyne sameness and complacency.

Now there was lot that was bad in the seventies, a lot of pseudo leftist posturing, the continual alphabet soup of the left and quite frankly a lot of crap being talked, not to mention economic chaos and hippy dippy utopianism. And I'll put my hand up and admit I was as prone to some of that as everyone else.

That said there was a challenging intellectual ferment, and I get the sense that there isn't that now, and it's not all being sublimated by other forms of creativity.

So where have all the crazy people gone?

Egypt, Tunisia, and twitter

To paraphrase Leon Trotsky, during the Russian Revolution, power fell into the streets, ie there came a point where none of the normal organisations commanded any effective power, neither the government or the formal opposition, and the Bolshevik party assumed power purely by being able to end the chaos of competing movements.

We saw power fall into the streets in Tunisa, we are seeing something similar happen in Egypt. Social media are allowing people to self organise into powerful ad hoc protest movements, without clear connections to the 'traditional' opposition.
We have also seen this to a more limited extent during the student protests in London before Christmas, where the protests were not dependent on the NUS for leadership and organisation as they would have been previously. And to be fair we have seen something similar happen unsuccessfully in Iran. And during the Queensland floods twitter and facebook helped people get organise to better cope with the consequences of the flooding.

There is both a powerful message here and an interesting evolving phenomenon here. Governments exist by the consent of their populace. And when when people talk of 'orderly transition' they usually mean power passing from one set discredited old men to another set of old men better able to command a degree of respect.

No longer. In the age of social media, governments need to obtain and keep the respect of their populations, as the people have learned that while governments may be made behind closed doors, but that the people can unmake them ...

What's an iPhone for

I have an iPhone, supplied by work in the days when I was responsible for keeping things working, so they could phone me up and tell me the world had crashed. As operations manager it was always my fault if it wasn't fixed.

And I didn't like it. Didn't like the glass keyboard, didn't like the appalling battery life whenever it saw a friendly wi-fi router, the crappy camera, etc etc. So much so that when I bought myself a new phone I bought a Nokia E63 - good email integration and push email, a keyboard you can (almost) type on, good battery life.

And I still prefer it over my iPhone. But last week, in Berkeley, the land of free wi-fi, I had a revalation. As I was flying back that afternoon, I wanted to check the news and weather at home, and also see what was happening in Egypt.

So I sat in a coffee shop on College Avenue, and watched the ABC Australia 90 second news bulletin via my iPhone.

And that's when I got it. Yes they need special apps rather than the open slather of the web but within the Apple ecology they can do some quite impressive things. And in our always on world, especially where increasingly people post videos of presentations rather than just the slides, powerful. Basically the iPhone is a content display device just like an iPad, except you can make calls with it, but it needs a decent infrastructure behind it to deliver.

Without either a cheap 3G data service or a wi-fi service all it is is a pretty crappy phone. With the backing infrastructure it comes alive as something way more useful ...

California dreaming ...

Last week I was in California at the project bamboo face to face meeting. And while you're not supposed to enjoy work travel. I did. Berkeley was, well I was going to say enchanting, but that's not the right word - something like 'charming plus' - there was definitely something verging on magical in the atmosphere and in the coffee shops, all of which (a) had free wi-fi, and (b) filled with laptop toting students - overwhelmingly macs - all discussing and doing. Made an old man feel nostalgic for his student days - even if then it had been spiral pads and line printer paper.

And that really is the point of this post - I had the good luck to study at a university - St Andrews - that encouraged intellectual curiosity and hence an intellectually stimulating environment.

All of us who have had that experience will realise the value of it - essentially learning to think, and will recognise it when we see it elsewhere. However the current 'user pays' quasi vocational model adopted by many universities seems to militate against this with its emphasis on passing exams and gaining credits.

Not a lot of intellectual stimulation there. Of course I'm sure there are stimulating lecturers within such a system, but let us say increasingly university education is basically about bums on seats.

It is my personal view however that this short changes students. Of course not everyone can go to Oxford, or Berkeley, or St Andrews or wherever, and not everybody wants to. Some people undoubtedly only want a degree as it's a prerequisite for medicine or engineering etc, and provides some guarantee of basic knowledge. Students should have their curiosity encouraged. Learning how to ask questions is possibly the most valuable part of education...