The Australian Perspective

1
The Australian Perspective

• How do Australian colleagues tackle similar
  challenges?

2

• Education is recognised by OECD member states
  as a fundamental key to wealth and
  competetiveness in the current global information
  economy
• A Borderless World, OECD, 1998

3

• An investment in knowledge pays the best
  dividends.
• Benjamin Franklin

4
The Key Role of Universities

• education
• creation of new knowledge
• employment and economic prosperity

5
The Australian Reform Agenda

• cost of course provision
• need for new income streams
• duplication
• international initiative
• disadvantaged groups
• links to other ITC Sectors
• community engagement
• greater emphasis on teaching
• management and governance

6

• sustainability conversion of opportunity
• quality teaching and learning
• equity wider participation
• diversity individual missions

7

• all involved in research
• staff development
• collaboration with business and industry
• deregulation
• international benchmarking
• research infrastructure
• graduate skills
• quality review

8

• With the corpus of human knowledge more than
  doubling with each passing decade, and access to
  sophisticated knowledge and skills emerging as
  the single most important competitive advantage
  in the international marketplace the education
  and training of knowledge workers will be one
  of the defining enterprises of the 21st century.!
• Alan Gilbert, Vice-Chancellor
• University of Melbourne

9
CAUL goals

• Maximising access to resources and services
• Transforming the current scholarly communication
  system
• Promoting continuous improvement in university
  libraries
• Advocating effective policies in an appropriate
  legal and regulatory environment

10
CRAUL 1928 Agenda

• Importance of the library within the university
• Extension of library privileges
• Relation of university libraries to the library
  movement
• Purchases of books and serials (consortial
  purchasing)
• Library addresses to students (information
  literacy)
• Pooling of library resources (distributed
  national collection)

11

• Catalogue of scientific periodicals
• Statistics on library expenditure
• Australian bibliography

12

• Sustainability
• Australian digital Theses Programme
• Electronic Database Services and Consortium
  Purchasing
• Research Resources Australia
• Australian Academic Research Libraries Network
• E-print Repositories
• Scholarly Communication

13

• 2. Quality
• CAUL/CAUDIT/ACODE
• University Library Australia
• Information literacy
• Best practice
• Equity
• 4. Diversity

14

• Scholarly Communication
• Problems
• New models

15

• Continuing roles
• overcoming information barriers
• changing the paradigm
• leading the knowledge environment
• connecting the past to the future
• enhancing information resources
• developing transferable skills
• part of the academic enterprise