Topic: Discovery and access
Issue Brief
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 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
June 26, 2014
NISO’s Open Discovery Initiative
Today, NISO is releasing the recommended practice for its Open Discovery Initiative. This important initiative is intended to bring greater order to the indexed discovery services that have achieved a market penetration of roughly three-quarters of US academic libraries, according to the most recent Ithaka S+R US Library Survey 2013 (pages 53-54). With such a high share of libraries positioning indexed discovery services as the primary discovery interface for their users, it is essential to address the concerns—both…
Issue Brief
May 28, 2014
Driving With Data
A Roadmap for Evidence-Based Decision Making in Academic Libraries
COUNTER-compliant usage statistics, service assessments, peer benchmarking—librarians have been gathering different types of data for some time, using data to measure the usage of their resources, the quality of their services, and how they stack up against similar institutions. But could library leaders collect data differently? In this Issue Brief Deanna Marcum and Roger Schonfeld suggest an approach where library leaders start not with the data that are easy to gather, but with the problems they are trying to solve. What does…
Blog Post
April 14, 2014
Discovery in the Library—Shifting Ground?
Helping users find content is one of the fundamental services that academic libraries have historically provided. As we have tracked in the Ithaka S+R survey of library deans and directors, it is also an area where there have been important and fast-moving changes. In the 2010 survey, library directors saw discovery as an area for increased investment, and many libraries subsequently put money into new-to-the-market index-based discovery services that promised to bring their collections together into a single search…
Issue Brief
March 25, 2014
Leveraging the Liaison Model
From Defining 21st Century Research Libraries to Implementing 21st Century Research Universities
What role might librarians play in building the 21st Century research university? How can librarians effectively assess the impact of the expertise, services, and resources they deliver to the academic community? In this issue brief, Anne Kenney, the Carl A. Kroch University Librarian at Cornell University, explores how librarians can leverage the liaison model to demonstrate “that the library is more than a purveyor of content and that its expertise is an essential component of the academic knowledge infrastructure on and…
Blog Post
January 29, 2014
Discovering Discoverability at ALA Midwinter
Last Sunday at ALA, I attended a presentation by Mary Somerville, University Librarian at the University of Colorado Denver, focusing on discoverability. Somerville recently co-authored a white paper on Collaborative Improvements in the Discoverability of Scholarly Content with Lettie Conrad of SAGE. I was glad to be able to participate as one of the interviewees in the Somerville-Conrad paper, which highlights some of the remarkable progress that has been made in discovery for scholarly purposes in recent years and makes…
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!…
Research Report
July 14, 2009
BOPCRIS Digitisation Centre 2009
Experimentation with Sustainability and Partnerships for Library Digitisation Projects
The University of Southampton’s Hartley Library has been engaged in a number of large scale, grant funded digitization initiatives focused on heritage materials such as parliamentary papers and British pamphlets. These projects left them with a challenge familiar to many grant-funded projects: developing a strategy to preserve access to the content after the grant period concluded. Early experiences suggested to library leadership that they were not well positioned to host this content locally, so with subsequent projects they began to…