Digital Wall : The University’s learning and information space

Abstract: A North American university is engaged in a large transformation project involving the wholeorganisation. Students, Lecturers, departments and additional questions from the shared leadership team are engaging in defining the services offered, in particular from the university library and its associated sub-services. It is an exciting time for the University as it seeks to not only define its services but also how these can be created and consumed.There are many aspects to this re-organisation and many items to be addressed. In this report,we look at the current situation at the University, as well as taking into account the aspirations of the stakeholders. We start by drawing out a Rich Picture, part of Soft System Methodology (SSM) (Checkland, 1981) which we use in order to spot opportunities that are available for further exploration. Much of the information that we use comes from material supplied by the University itself as well as interviews with the Head of Library services and Head of Library IT. We look indepth at how SSM assists in this process of evaluation through its focus on participation and how it may assist us to understand the many different perspectives collected in our research. SSM consequently assists in defining problems with solutions to any areas that have drawn our attention. Following the evaluation of collected data, discussions and our own observations, we identify that a digital wall that is being proposed for the redesigned library presents an opportunity to explore possibilities for exploitation of this technology. Further research on other digital walls such as Brisbane’s Cube (Abdi et al, 2014), and Auraria Library’s Discovery Wall(Burch, 2016) shows some of the uses that these walls have been put to and how the Institutions use them. We then use a number of models to evaluate the data that we collected on digital walls and from the North American University and analyse it in order to inform our thinking. These models can be used independently or collectively to evaluate data from different perspectives. As such we were able to look at problems and solutions from the perspective of many of the actors involved in shaping the future library services. These models and results are discussed in the report. Finally, we take our results and make a number of proposals for the North American University digital wall along with the relevant justifications at the end of this report.