UCISA continued

After the conference planning meeting, we had a UCISA Executive 2 day planning and strategy meeting. It began with a joint meeting with our "sister" organisation - SCONUL, where we discussed a few issues which IT and Library professionals have a common interest in. These included authentication, particularly in relation to access to electronic journals, and access to resources by visitors to the university. This latter issue was the subject of a joint UCISA/SCONUL project which went by the wonderful acronym of HAERVI and produced a very useful good practice guide.

One of the major issues in the meeting was a review of the UCISA groups. Currently there are 6:
Networking
Infrastructure
Corporate Information Systems
Staff Development
Teaching, Learning and Information
Procurement

They are all made up of volunteers from different institutions, and do an excellent job. However, we took the opportunity to review their remit, objectives and way of working and will be recommending some changes.

The day finished with a chance to discuss a number of hot topics with the Chairman of the JISC, Sir Ron Cooke. One of these was a recent report on students use of IT and the skills they have. Interestingly it found that the use of ICT in teaching and learning is still fairly primitive, and although students use IT all of the time, their skills are still fairly basic.