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IR and CSIRO

 

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Question:

Coming back to parallel experiences, is the CSIRO doing anything in this area at all? Do they have a silo?

Response:

CHR — They are a silo. No, actually they are very mindful to take Australian scientific research out to the broader community. There are pockets of activity and … sitting on the Research Coordinating Committee so their views and concerns are expressed through that forum. Their library support structures keeps being restructured, I think they’re a bit constrained at the moment, but there are people with wonderful skills who I’d like to see become involved, information management professionals with wonderful technological skills, because a lot of CSIRO’s work is actually done virtually.

JS — Can I just go back to the question of who should be doing these things, who should be doing the organisation and so on. I think it’s interesting that in the following questions and responses about what’s happening in Australia is that we’re seeing groups of libraries in Australia and leaders in those libraries coming forward and doing the lobbying to government, and that’s how it’s worked. There have been different groups, be it by sector, or be it by interest level, and the lobbying of government and the direction, and I wish to hear about and find out more myself, about who’s lobbying DEST in the directions that the DEST funding is being allocated for example, to drive it along this path, it seems to me that groups of libraries are making that happen.

Follow up (Guy Field, Christchurch Polytechnic):

This relates to Penny [Carnaby]’s question re the National Library [of New Zealand]’s budget, and it’s to do with the old chestnut of bandwidth. If the New Zealand research community are going to make progress with institutional repositories for a number of institutions, eventually, or sooner or later, bandwidth will become a limiting factor, especially as we look at developing multimedia and non-text based material within our repositories.

This table would like to comment generally for the National Library [of New Zealand] is to support endeavours to push that bandwidth and in particular to do with the advanced network and whether an affordable model for that can be developed.