The Great Melbourne University Library Controversy - Style over Substance?
Melbourne university link: http://www.lib.unimelb.edu.au/collections/erc/relocation.html
Parts of the history collection at Melbourne University have apparently been under threat for the last few months, with University administration claiming they will move substantial parts of the collection to a storage facility in Bundoora. This will make many researchers work impossible; the Age today reported comments from academics explaining that research involving the threatened collections will become impossible if they move (you can’t browse through collections when you need to order each individual book to be shipped in, 24 hours in advance). My own thoughts are that it would be a pretty bad way to keep books - essentially doubling or tripling the handling of each individual volume, and exposing them to the risks of frequent transport.
Since staff and students raised concerns, the university has been re-organising it’s plans to free up space elsewhere for the threatened collections, and you can see what they’re up to at the moment through the link, above. They also seem to be placating the threatened researchers and students by finally providing funding for a catalogue system that should have been in place long ago.
The reason for the move of the collections would be to free up space for the rather unfortunately named “Eastern Learning Hub Resource Centre”. As a former Melbourne student i’m a little weary of the way in which ‘new initiatives’ are initiated over there; much of the time, the language used by administration just underscores how much they see themselves as a business rather than an education and research institution.
The descriptions offered for the Eastern Learning Hub Resource Centre don’t do much to settle this weariness. See what you can make of the Dilbert-esque business-speak descriptions of this “Hub Resource Centre” through the link above.
More importantly, see if you can really identify anything about the mysterious Resource Hub Learning Centre that differs very greatly from the library faciilities already available dotted all over the campus, and in the Union building.
One of the key issues in the whole debacle seems to be the lack of space (and lack of funding for space) for the university to do everything it wants to do. Obviously they’ve made that issue somewhat worse by failing to prioritise research interests over what appear to be (from the language) advertising interests, for prospective students. But to return to the lack of space issue, could they not have avoided the problem by working on all the existing “resource centres” and “learning hubs” and “collaborative learning facilities” dotted around the university? And, considering the comments about the revamp to the catalogue system, does it strike anyone else as odd that a university should be prioritizing funding to yet another spot for students to sit at desks and type things rather than respecting the academics who actually justify the University’s very existence by enhancing the research capacity that is already present?
Either way, i guess the message for those who are actually seriously interested in supporting Australian universities in general is the same message drummed into us by every funding decision over the past ten years. Wether it’s the virtual destruction of the archaeology department at Monash University, or the destruction of student services at smaller universities that we’ve seen since “VSU” was introduced, or the change from “pure science” research to “applied science” research that now see the best palaeontology department in the country having to focus on oil exploration rather than palaeobiology - they’re all symptoms of a general lack of funding to higher education. We really, really have to kick the Liberals out of government!
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oath.
I remember when they first moved the collection into the lower levels of the ERC. It made for a very nice and quiet environment to “study” and “research”