Spotlight

Doesn’t time fly? It doesn’t seem many months since we were announcing the results of our annual Information Legislation & Management Survey for 2008 and here we now are, launching the same for 2009.

This will be the 5th year we have run the survey, covering every year that the sector has been coping with the full implications of the Freedom of Information Act. But although the introduction of FOI specifically and the impact it was having on institutions may have been the initial stimulus for this work its scope has broadened considerably over the years to include a more rounded coverage of the other legislation (both old and new) which directly determines the way in which our organisations must manage their information.

With there soon to be five years of accumulated data to draw upon, what originally started as interesting ‘point in time’ snapshots of how institutions were dealing with these laws has now become a fascinating longitudinal picture of its impact on the sector over time. As such it is no wonder that it its results are looked to by practitioners, senior managers and policy makers alike as both a barometer of current levels of compliance and the likely nature of future challenges.
But of course we rely totally on the time and effort devoted to this by those responsible for FOI in institutions the length and breadth of the country to make this happen. The continued support of Universities UK and GuildHE in promoting the survey certainly helps enormously but this year, in a bid to ensure that we continue to meet the needs of the sector we have gone even further. Last December we encouraged interested parties to review the questions we ask and the answers they generate and to suggest ways in which the survey could be improved. Where possible we have acted on the feedback we received for this year’s survey. One of the main results of this consultation process will be felt a little further down the line in the spring when the survey is closed and the results launched. For as well publishing our own take on the data as we have done in previous years we will also be making the raw data available for people to slice, dice and interpret as they wish.

This year’s survey is available from now until Friday March 5th from our website