Skip to Main Content

Archive: 2014

Blog Post
December 31, 2014

A Look Back at Ithaka S+R’s 2014 Publications

Happy New Year! Ithaka S+R published a record number of research reports and issue briefs in 2014 on two main themes: educational transformation and libraries & scholarly communications. As the New Year begins, we would like to share these with you once more, and we hope that they provide useful guidance for your work in 2015. As always, we welcome your feedback and questions. Use the comments form below or send us a tweet @IthakaSR. Educational Transformation:…
Blog Post
December 19, 2014

Innovation in Teaching and the Freedom to Teach

Last year the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) released a statement on the freedom to teach which asserts several rights for faculty, including the right to determine the texts and assessments within their courses. While recognizing that “common course syllabi and examinations are… typical,” the statement emphasizes that these “should not be imposed by departmental or administrative fiat.” Our newest issue brief, “Exploring the Contours of the Freedom to Teach,” considers the potential impact of AAUP’s statement on the…
Blog Post
December 17, 2014

Does Online Learning Have a Role in Liberal Arts Colleges?

Liberal arts colleges are known for low professor to student ratios, intimate seminar classes and highly personalized undergraduate experiences. On the surface, it is not obvious how online learning fits with this picture. But these days liberal arts colleges face many of the same pressures as larger universities – resource constraints, the growth of non-traditional students with more extracurricular responsibilities, even uncertainty about how a liberal arts education should evolve to stay relevant in a digital world. There is an…
Blog Post
December 11, 2014

Harnessing the Power of Technology at Public Research Universities

Public research universities face financial, legislative, and academic pressures to increase access to higher education, make it more affordable, and improve the learning outcomes of their students. Can technology help these institutions meet these challenges? Our researchers at Ithaka S+R, with funding from Lumina Foundation, undertook a study over the course of the 2013/2014 academic year to understand the current environment for public research universities. We interviewed 214 individuals, including academic administrators, directors of online learning, chief financial officers,…
Blog Post
December 10, 2014

What Role(s) Should the Library Play in Support of Discovery?

This week’s CNI meeting featured a variety of thought-provoking sessions on the digital issues facing academic libraries today, including privacy and preservation. I facilitated a session on Monday afternoon on discovery, using my recent issue brief on the topic to ask the question, “What Role(s) Should the Library Play in Support of Discovery?” While participants shared mixed views about the value of indexed discovery services at their institutions, with some expressing the sense of their real value especially…
Blog Post
November 25, 2014

Shaking It Up!

Yesterday, I attended a symposium sponsored by Digital Science, Harvard, Microsoft, and MIT, called “Shaking It Up: How to thrive in – and change – the research ecosystem.” I made the trip to attend this event in person because I am focusing some attention on serving the sciences right now, and the sessions featured a remarkable array of mostly new initiatives in support of scientific research and scholarly communication. The opening keynote featured an appropriately pointed but ultimately inspirational…
Blog Post
November 20, 2014

The Spaces Between

Notes from the Charleston Conference

At the Charleston Conference, Ithaka S+R hosted a session on “The Spaces Between,” which was intended to explore our communities’ needs for research that fall between the traditional boundaries of library, publisher, and vendor. As I mentioned in my opening remarks, these spaces can prove themselves to be cracks into which important issues fall unnoticed, or opportunities to build connections between communities with ultimately many shared interests. Our panel consisted of Joe Esposito, an independent publishing consultant, Susan Stearns,…
Blog Post
November 18, 2014

Studying Sales/Acquisitions Channels

Last week, Joseph Esposito announced on The Scholarly Kitchen a new research project in partnership with Ithaka S+R to study changing channels through which publishers sell to libraries and libraries acquire from publishers. We believe that the mechanisms for book sales/acquisitions are changing to some degree, especially at smaller libraries, with real implications both for the print and digital marketplace. We are thrilled to be launching this project in partnership with Joe, and grateful to the support of The…
Blog Post
November 16, 2014

The Meaning of Collections

Ownership, Access, and the Scholarly Ecosystem

A couple of weeks ago, while attending the Harvard Library Visiting Committee meeting, I participated in an amazing discussion of collection development strategies. I heard Harvard librarians saying that Harvard can no longer collect everything, indeed, shouldn’t collect everything, and needed to build strong collaborative relationships so that Harvard scholars and students would be able to find the resources they need to do their work. This view—access is more important than ownership—is not new among other academic and research libraries,…
Blog Post
November 13, 2014

Information Literacy and Research Practices

Yesterday, ACRL released the third draft of the Framework for Information Literacy for Higher Education and called upon the community to provide additional feedback. Against this backdrop, our latest issue brief is particularly timely. In “Information Literacy and Research Practices,” Nancy Fried Foster, Ithaka S+R’s senior anthropologist, demonstrates how “researchers in the wild” are adhering to many of the goals described in the draft Framework. While recognizing that the move away from the Information Literacy Competency Standards for Higher Education, in place…
Blog Post
October 29, 2014

Notes on Columbia’s Book History Colloquium

Yesterday, I attended Columbia University’s Book History Colloquium, which is sponsored by the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where Andrew Stauffer, associate professor of English at the University of Virginia, spoke about “Traces in the Stacks: 19th-Century Book Use and the Future of Library Collections.” Observing the trend in academic and research libraries towards moving tangible collections offsite, and sometimes de-accessioning them, in favor of digital versions, Stauffer is concerned about the implications for scholarship. Stauffer offered a richly illustrated…
Blog Post
October 13, 2014

Technology: Its Potential Impact on the National Need to Improve Educational Outcomes and Control Costs

On Monday, October 13, 2014, William G. Bowen delivered the opening address at Rice University’s De Lange Conference, “Technology: Its Potential Impact On The National Need To Improve Educational Outcomes And Control Costs.” We are pleased to publish it here as an Ithaka S+R issue brief. Bowen, who is president emeritus of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and also president emeritus of Princeton University, was the founding chairman of JSTOR/ITHAKA and continues to serve on ITHAKA’s board. The paper explores…
Blog Post
October 10, 2014

Notes from the ARL Fall Forum

The future of the monograph is of great interest to many humanists, scholarly publishers, and academic librarians. Last year, I wrote an issue brief, Stop the Presses: Is the monograph headed toward an e-only future?, that suggested the monograph’s digital future would prove to be much more complicated than what has been experienced thus far for journals. Yesterday, ARL’s fall forum, provocatively titled Wanted Dead or Alive – The Scholarly Monograph, served to confirm that the possible transition…
Blog Post
October 1, 2014

Discovery and the Library’s Role

Last week, my new issue brief on discovery came out. Since its release, there has been some very interesting discussion on the topic. I’ve tried to bring together some of the commentary from Twitter and blogs here and to suggest some future directions these imply for our community. A point of departure for the paper is an analysis of library directors’ responses to the strongly worded statement “It is strategically important that my library be seen by its users…
Blog Post
September 24, 2014

Does Discovery Still Happen in the Library?

Roles and Strategies for a Shifting Reality

In the age of the ubiquitous single search box, what role do libraries play in the discovery of scholarly resources? In this Issue Brief, Roger Schonfeld explores how the vision that the library should be the starting point for research—a vision many library directors hold—is often in conflict with the practices of faculty and students.  As users migrate to other starting points, librarians could invest in ways to bring them back. But there is also an opportunity for librarians to re-think…
Blog Post
August 27, 2014

Faster and Cheaper

Can a Digital-Centric Workflow Transform the Book Review?

Academic authors in the humanities and social sciences often wait three or more years to see the first reviews of their scholarly monographs. Why does it take so long? As Oona Schmid, director of publishing at the American Anthropological Association (AAA), describes in our latest issue brief, it is because book reviewing still relies on a print-centric system. Thanks to funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the AAA is now developing a prototype to completely re-imagine the book review…
Blog Post
August 14, 2014

Notes from the Library Assessment Conference in Seattle

The Library Assessment Conference took place last week in Seattle, a valuable forum for those gathering and using evidence in support of library management and planning. I attended, with my colleague Alisa Rod, Ithaka S+R’s surveys coordinator. The program included a diverse set of presentations on topics from information literacy to space planning. Ithaka S+R’s local surveys were also featured in a number of sessions on the program. Developing the Ithaka S+R Student Survey Alisa and Heather Gendron,…
Blog Post
August 14, 2014

The Role of Assessment in Libraries

Last week at the Library Assessment Conference in Seattle, I gave a talk on “Vision, Alignment, Impediments, Assessment.”  As academic libraries face a variety of strategic issues, I argued, they need to consider how to implement evidence-based decision making processes more broadly in their institutions.  There’s a significant role for the assessment community in building such processes, and as libraries continue to invest in assessment, they have the opportunity to use data to address their challenges. I reviewed some…
Blog Post
August 11, 2014

Dataset for UK Survey of Academics Available at ICPSR

In 2012, Ithaka S+R partnered with Jisc and Research Libraries UK to conduct the inaugural UK Survey of Academics. The report of findings was published in May 2013, and it is freely available on our website. This project was the first in several steps to internationalize Ithaka S+R’s US Faculty Survey. It developed rich findings for the UK higher education sector about discovery, open access, the print to electronic transition, research methods, and other issues of strategic relevance. As…
Blog Post
July 10, 2014

Ithaka S+R Releases Report on Hybrid Classroom Experiments at the University System of Maryland

New York, NY—During the same month that The New York Times declared 2012 the “Year of the MOOC,” Ithaka S+R partnered with the University System of Maryland (USM) to determine the feasibility of using MOOCs in new ways—incorporating MOOCs and other online technologies into undergraduate classrooms.  The results of that study are available today:  Interactive Online Learning on Campus: Testing MOOCs and Other Platforms in Hybrid Formats in the University System of Maryland. Over the course of a year,…