July 2008 Archives

ITS and the University Libraries have now completed their respective strategic plans. A new development in this strategic planning cycle was the decision by both organizations to plan together and be emphatic in our plans about our joint strategic directions. Of course there are many ways we already collaborate, and our future work together naturally builds on these, but our plans target two key areas that we will invest in together over the next five years.

The first of these is broadly termed as "Joint Service Delivery" and will focus largely on the implementation of the Knowledge Commons facility in Pattee/Paterno Library. The Knowledge Commons will be an open collaborative space where students - undergraduates initially - will have access to reference, IT and academic consultation services as well as state-of-the-art computing resources and the UL's rich collection of online and print resources. The Knowledge Commons concept isn't location-bound, however, and elements, such as collaborative workspaces and Digital Commons multimedia facilities, are already in development at various library locations at UP and the campuses. 

The second area we're targeting in the next five years is the creation of a Cyberinfrastructure, e-Content and Data Stewardship Program. Here's how this program is described in our strategic plans: 

Complementing ITS’s existing high performance computing and networking infrastructure and the University Libraries’ developing scholarly communications program, we will partner to develop a Cyberinfrastructure, e-Content, and Data Stewardship program. E-science or e-research is typically defined as collaborative, distributed, large-scale and data-intensive. ITS and the UL will develop sustainable strategies for the stewardship of the outputs of e-science over its lifecycle – providing a cohesive suite of access, discovery, preservation, curation, repository, archival and storage services. Our phased approach will initially entail needs assessments and prototyping of beta services while building out infrastructure that can be extended to other areas of digital content management.

Both of these programs are described in our respective strategic plans;  if you go to the ITS Strategic Planning wiki, you'll see them in the Appendix section. 

These programs are the result of six months of discussion, planning and input at various levels of ITS and the University Libraries. In February of this year, three open forums were held to foster discussion and gather input; the results of these discussions are also available on the ITS Strategic Planning wiki under the Planning Framework section. What you see in the two  programs is a result of the discussion at the forums; what was really reinforced in those sessions was how well the expertise and strengths of our organizations complement each other as well as the wisdom of our working together rather than duplicating effort. 

We have a lot of details to work out now and a lot of organization to do. What you see in the descriptions of both programs were put together for resource planning purposes and they aren't set in stone by any means (don't get too attached). More to follow on next steps.