Cambridge University Reporter


Information Strategy: Notice

18 October 2004

During the past year the Information Strategy Group has consulted representative groups throughout the University about their information needs and how these needs should be met. The Council have considered the recommendations of the Information Strategy Group following this consultation exercise and have agreed that the following information strategy for the University of Cambridge should be adopted.

Information Strategy

1. The University of Cambridge faces increasing demands for fast, efficient, and accurate management of information in all its forms. An Information Strategy has been developed to help all in the University to respond to those demands. The strategy encompasses all kinds of information, whether held in a book in a library, as a set of raw research notes, or in the form of key financial data. The strategy is being developed further with the express intent of putting the users' needs and aspirations first, rather than attempting to construct a 'top down' approach.

The management of information at Cambridge

2. The University of Cambridge is a knowledge-based institution par excellence. The raison d'être of the University is to devote itself to the maintenance, development, and advancement of all principal branches of scholarly knowledge within an environment which demands the highest attainable level of academic standards in teaching, research, and the wider dissemination and exchange of knowledge and information. An Information Strategy should support this objective and become a key component in the overall strategy for the University itself.

3. The University of Cambridge is also a complex institution in which decision-taking is both diffuse and devolved, a reflection of its self-governing and democratic status. The overall objective should be that information systems are managed in such a way as to maximize benefit to users, whilst achieving an acceptable level of ease of maintenance and cost over the long term.

Information and its management - general principles

4. All information systems, from collections of manuscripts to sets of scientific data, embody similar, if not identical, functions:

(i) the capture or acquisition of information, in whatever form;
(ii) its indexing, collation, and presentation under the relevant taxonomic rules;
(iii) its day-to-day management, and its maintenance, preservation, and archiving over an agreed time span, which may be relatively short-term or may be permanent, and includes the period when it is no longer needed to serve its original purpose;
(iv) appropriate cross-reference to other allied information systems;
(v) provision of controlled access and availability, which reflect the purpose for which that set of information has been brought together;
(vi) ensuring the security and integrity of the information set, both physically and with respect to content.

5. In view of this, a core set of principles should be applied to all information systems within the University, whatever their nature and purpose:

(i) it should be clear who owns each piece of information, who is responsible for maintaining and updating it, who has the right to alter it, and who is permitted to access it;
(ii) information should be acquired once only and the definitive version should be stored and kept up to date by its owner(s) as the primary data set;
(iii) standards should be adopted across the University for all aspects of information management where data have to be exchanged; these should include, especially, the categorization and indexing of data, the exchange of data, user interfaces to information, and document formats;
(iv) authorized users should be able to add information to data drawn from central databases and, if approved, to return such 'added value' information to the central database;
(v) a security policy must be put in place covering: confidentiality (protecting sensitive information from unauthorized use), availability (ensuring that information can always be accessed by authorized users), and integrity (knowing that it is accurate and up-to-date);
(vi) a records management policy must be put in place, for all types of information, to determine what should happen to all information and data (both paper and electronic) after it has ceased to be of relevance for administrative or immediate academic purposes and to ensure that archived electronic records, in particular, continue to be readable as technologies change; data will move from one context to another as their currency changes but must remain accessible over time;
(vii) as Web browsers are increasingly serving as a vehicle both for delivering information to users and for providing a standard interface for users to interact with information, a Web strategy should be developed covering the University's Web presence and containing guidelines to be observed by all those who provide information via this process.

6. These principles comprise the long-term aspirations of the Information Strategy of the University.

Medium-term objectives

7. The following medium-term objectives serve to support, and facilitate the systematic working towards implementing, the long-term aspirations:

(i) Electronic dissemination. The medium- and long-term strategies should be for the primary means of disseminating information within the University to become electronic. This would, in due course, have the effect that transmission of paper files would be phased out and printing would be entirely local, except for essential legal purposes.

(ii) Hard copy. As more and more facilities for electronic access become available, it will become easier for central production and physical distribution of hard copy documentation to be reduced. However, it has to be recognized that printing locally raises substantial resource and other real practical implications.

(iii) Research and archiving. Guidance on, and material support for, maintaining running records of continuing raw research output should be provided, either as a departmental responsibility or via a central institutional repository such as the University Library's 'DSpace' repository.

(iv) Individual identifier access. Access to information and/or data should become person dependent and should reflect the different roles of the individual, thus allowing them to access and manipulate information wherever they are by identifying themselves to the system, and not be dependent on a particular location or network.

(v) Data Protection and Freedom of Information legislation. These are statutory requirements which need to be promulgated thoroughly and their implications understood by all those affected.

Next Steps

8. To give practical voice to these principles, work has already begun in several identified areas of activity, such as the development of administrative, financial, and business systems, improved intranet, internet, and search engine access, records management and archiving. Piece by piece, these disparate components are being brought together to form a comprehensive plan to bring the information strategy into a working reality.