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Archive: 2012

Blog Post
December 4, 2012

Art Books and eBooks

A Difficult Conversation?

In late September, I participated in “Art Books & Ebooks: A Difficult Conversation?” an event hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, organized by Ross Day, Collections Development Librarian at the Met, and focused on the future of books, e-books, and museum publishing in a digital age. Participants reflected on the changing environment for publishing and collections development and management, focusing on how monographs in the field of art and art history fit into or are…
Blog Post
November 20, 2012

Sustainable Scholarship Conference 2012

Videos Now Available

ITHAKA hosted our annual Sustainable Scholarship Conference in October, bringing together librarians, publishers, scholarly society leaders, and a variety of others interested in how higher education is changing as a result of new technologies. This year’s theme was “The Question of Quality: New Forms of Grading, Credentialing, and Peer Review in the Digital World.” Videos of the presentations are now available online.  Here are some highlights: Keynote: Kevin Guthrie, president of ITHAKA, focused on some of the key…
Blog Post
November 8, 2012

Library Assessment and the Research Support Services for Scholars Program

Last week I presented at the 2012 Library Assessment Conference in Charlottesville, Virginia, where we previewed some of the results from two projects that are part of our Research Support Services for Scholars program. These projects take a closer look at the research support needs of historians (funded by the NEH in the US) and chemists (funded by the JISC in the UK). The conference proceedings led me to reflect on some of issues in the assessment…
Blog Post
October 12, 2012

The ‘Cost Disease’ in Higher Education

Is Technology the Answer?

This week William G. Bowen, ITHAKA trustee and Ithaka S+R senior advisor, delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values, hosted jointly by Stanford’s Center for Ethics in Society and The Office of the President at Stanford University. These lectures are now available as an ITHAKA publication, The ‘Cost Disease’ in Higher Education: Is Technology the Answer? Declining public support and steadily rising costs have caused tuition to rise faster than inflation (and family incomes) for many years. Concerns…
Blog Post
September 10, 2012

Ithaka S+R Faculty Survey 2012 is being fielded for US higher education

Ithaka S+R has this morning launched the 2012 cycle of our triennial Faculty Survey for US higher education. We are sending invitation emails to tens of thousands of faculty members across the US to ask them to participate, and we are grateful to the many faculty members who will take the time to respond. Their responses will allow us provide colleges and universities, libraries, scholarly societies, and academic publishers with insight into the evolving attitudes and practices of scholars…
Blog Post
July 30, 2012

How Online Learning Could Unbundle the University

Kevin Guthrie’s column in the new edition of Educause Review summarizes a number of findings from the Ithaka S+R report “Barriers to Adoption of Online Learning Systems in U.S. Higher Education.” He writes, “Digital and network technologies are commoditizing some basic aspects of teaching while they are simultaneously unbundling various aspects of a faculty member’s role.” It strikes me that the underlying drivers here have important implications for institutions as well as for faculty. This “commoditizing” and…
Blog Post
July 10, 2012

The Kanazawa Institute of Technology’s Library Roundtable Reaches a Milestone

Nearly every library recognizes the importance of global collaboration, but did you know that there is a Japan-US library program that has been operating for 30 years? The Kanazawa Institute of Technology’s Library Roundtable celebrated its 30th anniversary last week, and I had the pleasure of taking part in the program. The Japan-US library program started as a thank-you gesture from the director, Dr.  Sakai  of the KIT Library, who served as deputy director of the National Diet Library after…
Blog Post
June 28, 2012

Dispatches from ALA

At the ALA Annual Meeting this past weekend, I participated in two workshops that, while on very different topics, provide an interesting snapshot of how libraries are changing today. ACRL is continuing its interest in analyzing the value of academic libraries by hosting a workshop with library leaders to develop a future research agenda for this area of work. Spearheaded with Megan Oakleaf’s major literature review on the value of academic libraries and continuing more recently with summit meetings…
Blog Post
June 20, 2012

2010 Library Survey Dataset Now Available

Ithaka S+R’s ongoing survey research projects form a cornerstone of our efforts to understand how academic behaviors and practices are changing, and how service providers adapt. These surveys include the triennial Ithaka S+R Faculty Survey – last run in 2009 and now in planning for fall 2012 – as well as our Library Survey, which was most recently fielded in 2010 and focuses on the strategies that library administrators are pursuing for their libraries. In addition to coverage in…
Blog Post
June 11, 2012

Introducing Rebecca Griffiths

I’m thrilled to announce Rebecca Griffiths’s return to the S+R team, which she’ll be joining as program director for online learning. Rebecca was a founding member of Ithaka, initially helping to create Aluka, and then leading the launch of the Strategic Services practice (now part of Ithaka S+R). In addition to supporting business planning efforts for clients, she co-authored several of Ithaka’s influential papers on the sustainability of digital projects, uses of open source software in higher education, and…
Blog Post
June 5, 2012

ORCID and Identity Management Systems

Nature News & Comment recently published an article that focused on some of the ways that the scholarly community could benefit from the creation of a unified identity system for researchers. Researcher disambiguation might be able to simplify the process of applying for grants and submitting papers for publication. It also opens up a whole range of possibilities with regard to measuring scholarly productivity, tracking new forms of scholarship, and using data to learn more about scholarly communications.
Blog Post
May 30, 2012

Preservation on Display at University of Chicago’s Mansueto Library

One of the best things about the Association of Research Libraries spring meetings is that they are held in different parts of the country and hosted by member libraries in these areas. This year’s meeting was held in Chicago, and even though we met in the Downtown Marriott, we were transported by bus on the evening of Wednesday, May 4 to the University of Chicago for a reception and tour of the new Mansueto Library. It was worth the trip!…
Blog Post
May 22, 2012

Online Learning

A Zero Can Mean A Lot

Online learning is hardly a novel concept anymore. It’s hard to find a recent or current college student who hasn’t taken at least one course online. Whether or not they like the experience is another question—some seem to thrive on the flexibility and freedom of working at their own pace, others miss the face-to-face interaction with a live instructor. The real question is not whether online learning is here to stay—it almost certainly is—but whether it is making a fundamental…
Blog Post
May 14, 2012

Five Questions for Lawrence Bacow

Ithaka S+R’s recent report “Barriers to Adoption of Online Learning Systems in U.S. Higher Education” was the result of a months-long research process with input from many different colleges and universities. Our project team was led by Ithaka S+R senior advisor Dr. Lawrence Bacow, a respected educator and advocate for access to higher education, who retired from his post as president of Tufts University in 2011. After the publication of the report, I asked Dr. Bacow to reflect…
Blog Post
May 9, 2012

Video Series on Sustaining Digital Resources

Since 2007, Ithaka S+R and the Strategic Content Alliance (SCA) have been working together to examine the challenges that the academic and cultural heritage communities face in making sure that the digital resources they create will endure and provide value well beyond their initial creation. These short videos offer an introduction to our research on the sustainability of digital resources, and include useful guidance for those managing projects at universities, museums, and libraries. Feel free to view, embed or…