Topic: Digital scholarship and data management
Blog Post
April 14, 2020
Technologies at Hand
On Researcher Practices During a Pandemic
On March 25 I had the privilege of giving the introductory talk to NISO’s virtual conference on Research Behaviors and the Impact of Technology. The relationship between research behaviors and technology is a topic I have a birdseye view on through my work at Ithaka S+R, where I oversee a program examining scholars’ research practices discipline-by-discipline and we conduct a US-wide faculty survey triennially. The event was always already virtual and I found myself preparing amidst the…
Blog Post
April 6, 2020
Documenting the COVID-19 Pandemic
Archiving the Present for Future Research
As we go through the unprecedented COVID-19 pandemic, we are inundated by articles, images, video, statistics, and graphs through our handhelds and desktops coming from a variety of channels–including social media, news outlets, journals, and preprints. The sources of information expand from governmental agencies to research institutions, from policy makers to advocacy groups. And now archivists and others are asking how we can archive these rich and diverse sources of information–not only for future generations but also for…
Blog Post
April 2, 2020
The Latest US Library Survey
Since 2010, Ithaka S+R has fielded its triennial survey of academic library directors to track evolving strategies and priorities across the sector. Today we release findings from the 2019 survey cycle, which was fielded from October to December 2019. Much has obviously changed in the world since then. Most notably, the COVID-19 pandemic has drastically altered the plans of not only academic libraries but higher education as a whole. As we face an uncertain future,…
Research Report
April 2, 2020
Ithaka S+R US Library Survey 2019
Every three years Ithaka S+R conducts our Library Survey to track the changing strategic directions and priorities of the deans and directors of academic libraries. The data are gathered during a relatively brief window of approximately four weeks. In the case of this most recent survey cycle, that moment in time was the fall of 2019, well before any of us had heard of COVID-19.
Past Event
March 25, 2020
Researcher Behaviors and the Impact of Technology
Danielle Cooper Speaks at Virtual NISO Conference
On Wednesday, March 25, Danielle Cooper is presenting at NISO’s virtual conference on Researcher Behaviors and the Impact of Technology. Her talk, “Simplicity is the Ultimate Sophistication: Accessible, Ubiquitous Technologies & Their Affordances for Research,” is from 12:15-12:45. For more information on the conference, please see NISO’s website. About the presentation When we think of what technologies have the potential to drive research forward our minds often alight to exciting new developments that…
Blog Post
February 18, 2020
Progress in Biomedical Data Sharing
Headlines from the Recent NIH Workshop
The biomedical sciences have been a key focus area for efforts to promote research data sharing. Effective data management and sharing policies have the potential to improve research efficiency and accuracy, with real implications for human health. Last week, I attended a workshop hosted by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) on “Establishing a FAIR Biomedical Data Ecosystem: The Role of Generalist and Institutional Repositories to Enhance Data Discovery and Reuse.” NIH has been making significant…
Past Event
February 19, 2020
Data Communities: Empowering Researcher-Driven Data Sharing in the Sciences
Danielle Cooper at the International Data Curation Conference
On Wednesday, February 19, Danielle Cooper is presenting on “Data Communities: Empowering Researcher-Driven Data Sharing in the Sciences” at the International Data Curation Conference in Dublin, Ireland. For more information and to register, please see the conference website.
Past Event
March 12, 2020
The Data Disconnect
Kurtis Tanaka at the 2020 RDAP Summit
On Thursday, March 12, Kurtis Tanaka is presenting on “The Data Disconnect: How Changing Industry Data Sharing Policies Impact Business Research and Pedagogy” at the Research Data Access & Preservation Association’s 2020 Summit in Santa Fe, New Mexico. For more information and to register, please see the conference website. About the presentation Business represents the most popular undergraduate major in the United States and is a field that heavily relies on data for both research and instruction. This reliance…
Past Event
January 20, 2020
Oya Y. Rieger at the ASAPbio January 2020 Workshop
A Roadmap for Transparent and FAIR Preprints in Biology and Medicine
Oya Y. Rieger is one of the organizers of the upcoming ASAPbio January 2020 Workshop: A Roadmap for Transparent and FAIR Preprints in Biology and Medicine. The workshop will take place on January 20-21, in Hinxton, UK. Oya will also lead a session on citations, archiving, sustainability, and adoption on Tuesday January 21 at 11:45 am. To view the complete agenda, please see the workshop website. About the workshop reprints offer an opportunity to advance science through…
Past Event
January 10, 2020
Rebecca Springer at the Modern Language Association Annual Convention
On Friday, January 10, Rebecca Springer is taking part in a panel discussion on “What Is Humanities Research Now?” at the Modern Language Association Annual Convention in Seattle. She’ll be joined on the panel by Amanda L. Watson (New York U), John Tofanelli (Columbia U), Matthew Roberts (U of Illinois, Urbana), Ashley Champagne (Brown U), Darby Fanning (U of Utah), and Julie Frick Wade (MLA). The Modern Language Association’s Mary Onorato is moderating. For more information, please see the…
Blog Post
December 12, 2019
Teaching Business: New Report Explores the Needs of Business Faculty
Today Ithaka S+R is releasing the first report in a new program focused on supporting teaching practices. In it, we explore the needs of faculty teaching undergraduate business. We started with business as it is consistently one of the most popular majors in the United States, and understanding the needs of faculty in this field can have a large impact on undergraduate teaching and learning. Informed by interviews with 158 business…
Research Report
December 12, 2019
Teaching Business
Looking at the Support Needs of Instructors
Business represents the most popular undergraduate major at American colleges and universities and was seen as the ideal discipline to begin with, especially as the potential number of students to be positively impacted is correspondingly large. The goal of this report, therefore, is to provide actionable findings for organizations, institutions, and professionals who support the teaching practices of business educators. This report describes the teaching practices of business instructors, both those that are common to all college level instruction as…
Blog Post
December 10, 2019
Perspectives on the 2018 US Faculty Survey in Against the Grain
Every three years when we release findings from our national faculty surveys, we receive a plethora of reactions and responses to the results. There was no exception when we released the 2018 results in conjunction with the ACRL conference in April 2019. While these high-level quantitative results offer strong evidence toward understanding faculty practices and perspectives, particularly for tracking change over time, many who work in academic libraries, learned societies, and…
Past Event
December 9, 2019
Data Sharing from the Ground Up
Danielle Cooper and Rebecca Springer at CNI
On Monday, December 9, 2019, at 2:30 pm, Danielle Cooper and Rebecca Springer will present on “Data Sharing from the Ground Up: Building Data Communities” at the CNI Fall Meeting in Washington DC. For more information and to register for the conference, please see the CNI website. Abstract There is a growing consensus that research can progress more quickly, more innovatively, and more rigorously when scholars share data with each other. Policies and supports for data sharing…
Blog Post
October 31, 2019
Three Questions for Mark McBride
SUNY central system administration and its 64 campus libraries have been working with Ithaka S+R to develop strategies for collaboration and partnership in the context of substantial strategic and technological change. For our most recent newsletter, we spoke with Mark McBride, senior strategist in SUNY’s Office of Library and Information Services, about how this is unfolding across the system and why he thinks it is so important. What did you learn from Ithaka S+R’s analysis of publishing across SUNY’s…
Blog Post
October 21, 2019
Beyond Innovation: Emerging Meta-Frameworks for Maintaining an Open Scholarly Infrastructure
There are numerous free and community-based academic and cultural resources that are designed and built on open source or open access principles. Undertaken by not-for-profit mission-driven organizations, such services and technologies aim to introduce innovation to various stages of scholarly communication from designing research projects to publishing results. Today, amid growing concerns about their long-term durability and agility, there is renewed interest in sustainability, business models, revenue, and maintenance. In our previous post, we looked back at some…
Blog Post
October 1, 2019
Sustaining the Open Sector: A Brief Look Back
During the last two decades, we’ve seen the emergence of several open source (OS) and open access (OA) initiatives designed to support the academic and cultural community’s needs for more effective, versatile, and cost-efficient tools. Since 2006, Ithaka S+R has explored the sustainability requirements of these resources, investigating both the factors that lead to success and the reasons behind setbacks and failures. Today, amid the failure of several cross-institutional “open” initiatives and the broader search for funding to…
Blog Post
September 19, 2019
Emergent Data Community Spotlight III
An Interview with Kitty Emery and Rob Guralnick on ZooArchNet
Successful data sharing crosses disciplinary silos. As Danielle Cooper and I argued in a recent issue brief, “data communities” — formal or informal groups of scholars who share a certain type of data with each other — emerge both within and across disciplinary boundaries. In order to understand how these data communities emerge — and to understand how they can best be supported — I’ve been seeking out leaders who are at the…
Blog Post
September 16, 2019
Building Data Skills across the Globe
A Virtual Roundtable with Library Carpentry
As scholars across disciplines increasingly turn to data-intensive research methods, academic libraries are considering how to adapt to meet the growing demand for research data instructional and advisory services. In a recent blog post, I observed that among R1 institutions in the United States overall staffing levels for research-data-dedicated library roles remain low, with over half of R1s sporting zero or one data librarian in their university libraries. But hiring dedicated data librarians…
Blog Post
September 10, 2019
Emergent Data Community Spotlight II
An Interview with Felicity Tayler and Marjorie Mitchell on the SpokenWeb Project
For all today’s technological affordances, research data sharing remains a fundamentally social activity, dependent on building “data communities” from the ground up. Danielle Cooper and I argued as much in a recent issue brief, and since then, I’ve been seeking out pioneers who are at the forefront of efforts to grow emergent data communities in a variety of research areas. What does it take to get a successful data sharing movement off the…