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June 10, 2025

Applying AI Literacy to Student and Faculty Personas

Insights from our AI Literacy Cohort Workshops

This May, we hosted the first workshops for our Integrating AI Literacy in the Curricula cohort, a group of 45 colleges and universities committed to promoting AI literacy as a core learning outcome on their campuses. In the first half of the workshop, we facilitated a discussion of information literacy and AI literacy frameworks. In the second breakout session, participants selected one of six provided personas and hypothesized about the risks, benefits, and needs of AI use for…
June 10, 2025

Is AI Literacy the Trojan Horse to Information Literacy?

Insights from our AI Literacy Cohort Workshops

In April 2025, we launched the Integrating AI Literacy into the Curricula cohort project, in collaboration with librarians and educators at 45 colleges and universities, to conduct research on the current state of AI literacy and develop actionable pathways to providing effective AI literacy programming for students and faculty. In mid-May, we held our first cohort workshops to start thinking through AI literacy using shared language. After reviewing the ACRL information literacy framework and existing AI literacy frameworks,…
June 9, 2025

The Divided State of AI in Higher Education

To help libraries and centers for teaching and learning adapt their expertise in data, digital, and information literacy to AI literacy, we launched the Integrating AI Literacy into the Curricula cohort project. We held the kickoff meeting in April, welcoming participants from all 45 institutions involved in the project. Participants shared their observations and experiences with current AI literacy initiatives at their institutions, including challenges and successes. Several interesting themes emerged from these discussions. When it comes to AI…
May 19, 2025

AI Implementation and Governance at Emerging Research Institutions

Announcing a New NSF-Funded Planning Grant

Generative and other AI tools have the potential to transform and accelerate scientific research and communication. However, realizing that potential will require institutions to invest in the administrative and technical infrastructure, staffing, and capacity required to manage the data security, compliance, technical, and ethical issues of generative AI usage at the institutional level, and provide professional development for staff in units engaged in all aspects of the research enterprise. Creating this infrastructure will be difficult for all universities, but is…
April 9, 2025

Integrating AI Literacy into the Curricula

A New Cohort Project Gets Underway

While the technological and commercial landscape remains fluid, and the long-term impacts of AI on teaching and learning remain contested, colleges and universities are ready to shift from reactive to proactive engagement with AI. AI literacy will be a cornerstone of that engagement at many institutions. The idea that students will need to know how to use and think critically about AI is one on which skeptics, agnostics, and advocates can largely agree. A few universities have already launched AI…
March 10, 2025

University Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) in Action

Announcing an Ithaka S+R Webinar

For over two decades, Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) have played an important role in the private sector, serving as centralized hubs for managing open source engagement and strategy. Facilitating the development, contribution, and governance of widely used tools and critical digital infrastructure, the value of OSPOs is well established in corporate contexts.  In higher education, however, OSPOs have only recently begun to gain traction. Universities and their employees rely extensively on open source software for…
February 10, 2025

Defining and Implementing AI Literacy

Announcing a New Cohort Project

Defining and implementing AI literacy is complicated by rapidly evolving technologies and the difficulty of foreseeing the magnitude and variety of AI’s effects on teaching and learning, career readiness, and civic life. Creating institutionally specific frameworks for AI literacy and building the programming and resources necessary to integrate it into undergraduate education will require contributions from across the university. Libraries are well positioned to be campus and even national leaders in these efforts.
September 11, 2024

From Drawing to Doing

The Implementation of Cross-Campus Research Data Services Solutions

In February 2023, Ithaka S+R launched Building Campus Strategies for Coordinated Data Support, a project designed to help universities create viable strategies for delivering and sustaining research data service across campus. Following workshops to conceptualize new approaches or solutions to service delivery, cohort teams revisited some of the design thinking activities on their own campuses and honed in on a tangible idea or solution to implement.
May 14, 2024

Drawing New Directions for Research Data Services

In response to universities’ strategic need to provide effective data support services to researchers, Ithaka S+R launched the Building Campus Strategies for Coordinated Data Support project in February 2023. In the first two phases of the project, participants conducted an inventory of data services on their campus and interviewed researchers about their research data services support needs. Spring 2024 marked the beginning of phase three during which participants will implement innovative strategies to assist researchers in navigating support services…
March 14, 2024

An Emerging Framework for Data Services for Indigenous Data

As part of our ongoing project, Building Campus Strategies for Coordinated Data Support, we completed a national inventory of research data services offered at higher education institutions across the US and Canada. While conducting the inventory, we observed an uneven approach to the topic of Indigenous research data sovereignty and governance at libraries and other units involved in research support and facilitation. Some schools provided robust information about the imperative for Indigenous groups and scholars to have control over…
March 14, 2024

Mapping Research Data Support Services

A New Report from Ithaka S+R Shares Findings from an International Inventory

The complexity of contemporary research practices have created significant demand for a wide range of support services within university research communities. Libraries and other campus units have responded by developing an array of research data support services to help researchers learn new tools, improve their skill sets, and manage their data across the research lifecycle. Because these services often evolved without central oversight or cross-unit coordination, it can be difficult for users to understand exactly what is available to them…
February 29, 2024

Crossing Boundaries

Hong Kong University of Science and Technology’s Twin Campuses and International Collaboration

On September 1, 2022, Hong Kong University of Science and Technology (HKUST) opened a new “smart green” campus in Guangzhou, China. Described as “heralding the university of the future” and designed for climate emergencies, this campus represents a significant milestone in HKUST’s strategic vision as it partners with the original HKUST campus located just across the border in Clear Bay, Hong Kong.
January 16, 2024

Open Source Program Offices

Options for Housing OSPOs within a University

Open Source Program Offices (OSPOs) have become a familiar concept in large technology firms and technology-forward companies in a variety of other industries. Across the past couple of decades, companies have used OSPOs as centralized hubs for their open source software-related activities. OSPOs have been useful for establishing frameworks for how companies use and contribute to open source software, as well as making sure their engagement aligns with their broader business objectives.
June 1, 2023

Coordinating Research Data Services

Key Barriers and Questions

This spring, 107 librarians, administrators, and staff from the 29 universities participating in Ithaka S+R’s Building Campus Strategies for Coordinated Data Support project began to identify barriers to streamlining their research data support services. The project’s first two meetings brought together representatives from university units involved in supporting academic researchers: librarians, senior administrators, research officers, and research computing staff. Working primarily in small groups roughly divided by professional capacity, participants described the ways that different university units—and different institutional…
April 25, 2023

Reflecting on Restricted Access to a Chinese Research Lifeline

The rising geopolitical tensions between the United States and China are prompting both nations to restrict exports of technologies with military applications or in areas with significant economic value. Increasingly, these restrictions are calling international commitments to the open sharing of academic research into question. Last month, the Chinese government announced new restrictions on international access to the most important academic database in China, the China National Knowledge Infrastructure Database (CNKI) (中国知网). For researchers in the US the CNKI is…
March 22, 2023

Campus Strategies for Data Support Services

Welcoming the Second Cohort

What research data services do campuses currently offer and are researchers aware of them? What funding models can support the costs of centralized data services? Where in the larger organizational structure should these services reside? How can institutions make informed staffing decisions to ensure the expertise needed to support current and future services? As the need for robust, effective, and coordinated research data services on college campuses grows increasingly acute, these are some of the key questions members in our…
March 6, 2023

The Future of Data Sharing in the Humanities

As the National Endowment for the Humanities updates its policies in response to last year’s announcement of new federal guidelines issued by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) regarding public access to research publications and data, humanists will face urgent questions about how their scholarly practices within the global trends towards mandatory data sharing. When should the evidence humanists collect be considered data, and when is it appropriate to share those data? How might humanists…
February 2, 2023

Building Campus Strategies for Data Support Services Project Kicks Off

With 2023 coined the “year of data” by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, and data-intensive research methods growing across disciplines, campuses throughout the US and Canada are recognizing the strategic need to build a centralized approach to providing data support services to researchers. These services are often provided by the library, in addition to other campus units scattered across the university. Developed over time and with minimal coordination, data support services tend to exist in silos,…
January 26, 2023

Teaching with Streaming Video

A New Report from Ithaka S+R Provides Insights from Instructors

Instructors from all disciplines have incorporated video into their syllabi, and—unsurprisingly—streaming video is now the dominant format to which they turn. Faculty and students appreciate the flexibility of streaming video, which students can access on a variety of platforms ranging from YouTube to subscription services licensed by university libraries. Libraries are now making significant investments to license streaming content for educational use and anticipate that their spending in this area will double over the next five years. As the…
December 16, 2022

Reflecting on the Ithaka S+R Fellowship Program

A Conversation with Two Former Fellows

Each year, Ithaka S+R welcomes a cohort of early-career researchers to join our team as fellows. Over the course of 12-16 weeks, the program immerses the fellows in our projects and partnerships, providing the opportunity to make real contributions to research that tackles critical challenges in higher education, advances equity, and fosters innovation.