Topic: Cross-institutional collaboration
Blog Post
August 9, 2022
Sustaining Scientific Data Sharing Communities
Findings from an Incubation Workshop
The sharing of research data is essential to open science, and major funders have made significant investments in building an infrastructure of domain and generalist data repositories to support data sharing. While barriers to data sharing remain a challenge, many communities of researchers actively and voluntarily share and reuse data to advance science in areas of mutual interest. Understanding the successes and challenges these “data communities” face is important to providing support for their evolving needs as they grow, and…
Blog Post
August 2, 2022
New Opportunity for Stopped-Out College Students in Northeast Ohio to Settle Debt and Access Stranded Credits
Ohio College Comeback Compact Launches Summer 2022
Thousands of college students in Northeast Ohio who left school without a degree and owe money to their former college now have a pathway back to settle the debt and continue their education. Beginning this month, the Ohio College Comeback Compact is contacting approximately 15,000 students with a new proposition: come back to any public college in the region, even if you owe money and your transcript is being held because of it. Eligible students who…
Blog Post
July 20, 2022
The Many Faces of Meetings
A Taxonomy of Emerging Models for In-Person and Hybrid Conferences
Scholarly conferences are at a crossroads. The pandemic has made it clear that virtual meetings are not only possible, but make conferences more accessible to a broader, and more diverse audience. At the same time, the pandemic has clarified the unique value that in-person meetings offer due to their capacity to leverage physical proximity to promote social engagement, networking, and serendipitous interaction that foster the generation of new ideas. As organizers begin to shift their…
Blog Post
July 12, 2022
The Show Goes On: Growing an Ecosystem Devoted to Academic Equity
2022 Academic Equity Summer Institute
in 2019, 18 colleges and universities from across the country came together at Georgetown University for the inaugural Summer Institute on Equity in the Academic Experience, devoted to surfacing strategies and programs to help ensure the success of students from underrepresented backgrounds. Three years later, the number of participating colleges has nearly tripled (50), with over 400 institutional representatives joining the 2022 Summer Institute on Equity in the Academic Experience last month to advance this mission.
Blog Post
June 30, 2022
How Can Data Librarians Support Data Communities?
An Interview with Jordan Wrigley
Data communities provide social and practical incentives for scientists to voluntarily share and reuse data with colleagues. In order for data communities to emerge and grow, they need support. Information professionals, such as data librarians and research computing specialists, can advise data communities on best practices for data sharing and help them create or improve the required infrastructure, such as online repositories and metadata schemas. However, research scientists and information professionals rarely have structured opportunities to meet together,…
Blog Post
March 17, 2022
Evaluating the Transfer Pathways to the Liberal Arts Initiative
Strengthening transfer pathways between two-year and independent not-for-profit four-year institutions is one under-utilized way to increase transfer and bachelor’s degree completion. Independent colleges offer high graduation rates, flexible degree options, and personalized supports that can assist students looking to complete a four-year degree. Increasing transfer to these institutions at scale can be accomplished through state- or consortium-wide pathways that link all community colleges in a state to a critical number of independent four-year institutions. The…
Blog Post
February 11, 2022
Announcing the Next Cycle of the Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey
The Mellon Foundation and Ithaka S+R opened the third cycle of the survey on February 7
In 2014 and 2018, Ithaka S+R partnered with the Mellon Foundation, the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), and the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), to conduct a quantitative study on diversity within art museums who are part of these associations. We are excited to announce the continued collaboration through a third cycle of the demographic survey examining diversity amongst art museum employees. Previous Cycles The idea…
Blog Post
February 2, 2022
Bringing Credit Transfer into Focus
New Report on the Articulation of Transfer Credit at CUNY Project
When a student transfers from one college to another, the receiving college has to decide how to treat the credits that the student earned at prior institutions. While the specific process varies from place to place, in general, the institution has to make two interrelated decisions: (1) the course equivalency—how each course the student completed at another institution translates into courses in the catalog at the new institution, and (2) how the translated courses…
Research Report
February 2, 2022
Archiving Degree Audit Data to Measure and Reduce Lost Transfer Credit
Since June 2019, the Articulation of Credit Transfer project (ACT) has focused on streamlining the information, advising, and administrative processes concerning how credits from one City University of New York (CUNY) institution transfer to another CUNY institution. This work addresses a critical challenge at CUNY, and indeed, across American higher education. When students transfer from one college to another, they frequently are unable to count their previously earned credits toward degree requirements at their new institution, jeopardizing their ability to…
Blog Post
December 9, 2021
Charting a Path Forward for Academic Conferences
Announcing the Cohort for Our Project on the Future of Scholarly Meetings
Conferences and meetings are among the most venerable and vital services scholarly societies provide to members. They serve as gathering places for communities and important venues for scholarly communication. They are also essential to many societies’ financial models. The global pandemic has accelerated existing pressures on academic conferences, forcing societies to adopt virtual and hybrid formats. It has become clear that these new modalities have tangible benefits to members and the potential to reach new constituencies, but financial…
Blog Post
December 8, 2021
A Sustainable Solution to Settle Students’ Debt and Release Stranded Credits
Ithaka S+R and Eight Ohio Public Institutions Announce Promising New Pilot
Since publishing our first report on the subject in October 2020, Ithaka S+R has been at the forefront of defining the problem of stranded credits. We are now moving ahead with testing a potentially groundbreaking solution. “Stranded credits” are credits that students have earned but can’t access because their former institution is holding their transcript as collateral for an unpaid balance to the institution. Ninety-five percent of…
Blog Post
November 12, 2021
Announcing a New Research Collaboration
Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums and Ithaka S+R Are Fielding the First Art Museum Trustee Survey this Fall
We are excited to announce the launch of Ithaka S+R’s collaboration with the Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums (BTA). BTA, a sponsored project of Rockefeller Philanthropy Advisors, is a membership organization working to increase the inclusion of Black perspectives and narratives in North American art museums to make these institutions more equitable and excellent spaces of cultural engagement. Using programming, research, and strategic communications, BTA is helping its members–Black trustees…
Blog Post
November 11, 2021
Engaging Undergraduates in Primary Source Research
An Interview with the Authors of Two New Books
Creating meaningful learning encounters with primary sources involves dynamic collaboration between instructors and those who work with cultural heritage collections, including librarians, archivists, and museum professionals. Here at Ithaka S+R we have been engaging in a series of studies in collaboration with academic libraries, archives, and museums to understand instructors’ support needs in this area, including how to support their teaching with digital cultural heritage materials as classes went remote during the pandemic. In addition to understanding instructors’ experiences…
Blog Post
October 18, 2021
The Future of Scholarly Meetings
Announcing a New Cohort Project Funded by the Sloan Foundation
The COVID-19 pandemic forced scholarly societies to reimagine one of their signal offerings: academic conferences. In response, societies experimented with virtual and hybrid meeting formats on a scale that was difficult to imagine before March 2020. Societies have emerged from these experiments with an equal measure of worry and cautious optimism about the potential of these new forums to replace or supplement the traditional annual meeting. With generous funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Ithaka…
Past Event
July 29, 2021
Lessons from Library Collaborations
Roger Schonfeld Speaks at the WEST Members Meeting
On Thursday, July 29, Roger Schonfeld will present on “Lessons from Library Collaborations” at the West Members Meeting. The event runs from 12:30 -2:00 pm PT. For more information, please visit the California Digital Library’s website. About the talk: Academic and research libraries have sought for more than a century to collaborate with one another in order to achieve wider and more efficient access to collections, generate greater negotiating power, and provide stronger systems and services. To succeed, library…
Blog Post
July 8, 2021
Provocative, Productive, and Collaborative: The 2021 Academic Equity Summer Institute
We gratefully acknowledge the many individuals who devoted their time, energy, and expertise to the 2021 summer institute and the insights shared below, including Randall Bass, Heidi Elmendorf, Mark Joy, Susannah McGowan, and Brittany Toscano Gore of Georgetown University, Katie Brock and Ulili Emore of the University of Texas at Austin, and Nathaniel Holmes and Richard Peters of Xavier University of Louisiana. The ongoing work of the ATI academic equity community of practice would not be possible without them. Introduction…
Blog Post
May 6, 2021
Reconciling with the Past: Addressing Institutional Connections with Slavery
In a series of blog posts, I have discussed the origins and developments of postsecondary efforts to address institutional connections with slavery. This final blog post will discuss how institutions can push beyond their historical entanglements with slavery to address the current legacies of institutional racism. While a growing number of institutions have sponsored historical inquiries examining their own institutional involvement with slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries, and many have issued statements decrying systemic…
Blog Post
March 25, 2021
The State of the Humanities
Notes from the National Humanities Alliance Annual Meeting
Each spring, the National Humanities Alliance (NHA) organizes an annual meeting and an accompanying national advocacy day, in which representatives from most states meet with congressional offices to make the case for federal funding of the humanities. In 2020, 184 individuals representing 41 states held 287 meetings with congressional offices on Capitol Hill. Ithaka S+R is committed to supporting humanists in their work, through projects such as measuring the value of a liberal arts education, the analysis of the…
Blog Post
March 23, 2021
Teaching with Primary Sources: Pre-Pandemic Lessons for Post-COVID Futures
The second iteration in Ithaka S+R’s Teaching Support Services project investigates the teaching practices and support needs of instructors who work with primary source materials. Today we are excited to publish the project’s capstone report. Still in the pandemic but beginning to glimpse life on the other side, now is an opportune time to begin to envision not just the future, but the many potential futures…
Blog Post
March 23, 2021
Relationships Matter
How participation in the Teaching with Primary Sources Study Helped Strengthen and Develop Cross-Campus Relationships
Ithaka S+R’s capstone report on teaching with primary sources was published today. To coincide with its release, we invited one of the project’s local research teams to reflect on their experience participating in the project and how they are building on the project’s findings. Why did we want to participate in Ithaka S+R’s Teaching with Primary Sources Project? In 2019, Ithaka S+R invited Washington & Lee University (W&L) Library to participate…