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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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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…

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.