Blog
February 16, 2022
Understanding Educational Space Needs in Prisons
New Project Announcement
Across higher education, classrooms and study commons have been reimagined to foster student engagement and learning. But for higher education in prison programs, it can prove challenging to find spaces optimized for education, much less space designed to support their educational needs. Access—or the lack of access—to classrooms, libraries, and scientific and computer labs, can play determining roles in the quality of higher education programming. With many competing demands for space, Departments of Corrections (DOC) may be inclined to look…
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…
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February 3, 2022
An Interview with Dr. Jay Darr, Director of University Counseling Center at the University of Pittsburgh
A Deep Dive on the Importance of Mental Health and Its Shared Responsibility Across Campus
Dr. Jay Darr is the Director of the University Counseling Center (UCC) at the University of Pittsburgh (Pitt), a member of the American Talent Initiative’s (ATI) Academic Equity Community of Practice (CoP). As part of our Academic Equity Interview Blog series (for our first post we interviewed Claremont McKenna’s Nyree Gray on campus climate), we asked Dr. Darr to help…
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…
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January 18, 2022
Turning on the TAP
Restoring Tuition Assistance for Incarcerated Students in New York
In her first State of the State address since taking office, New York Governor Kathy Hochul outlined an agenda that included repealing the 27-year ban on college tuition assistance, also known as TAP, for incarcerated students. In 1995, when the ban was first instituted, incarcerated students accounted for less than 1 percent of TAP funding state-wide. The ban dovetailed with the 1994 Crime Bill’s elimination of federal Pell grants for incarcerated students and…
January 18, 2022
Ithaka S+R is Growing: Join Us!
Over the past few years, the scope and breadth of Ithaka S+R’s work has grown substantially. The Libraries, Scholarly Communication, and Museums program has seen increases in cohort projects that explore critical issues facing libraries; grant funded initiatives focused on digital preservation, higher education in prison, student success, and museum leadership; national surveys of faculty, community college administrators, and archivists; and sponsored work on topics including the health of the research enterprise and diversifying collections. To…
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January 13, 2022
15 Best Practices for Basic Needs Data Collection and Management in Higher Education
Over the past two years, we have been examining how community colleges define and measure student success. Through an extensive landscape review, interviews with institutional research and effectiveness officers, and a national survey of community college provosts, it has become clear that student success is often tied to whether students’ basic needs are being met sufficiently. But collecting data on basic needs—such as…
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January 12, 2022
Preprints: Their Evolving Role in Science Communication
New Publication
We are pleased to announce the publication of Preprints: Their Evolving Role in Science Communication by Iratxe Puebla and Jessica Polka, both of ASAPbio, and Ithaka S+R’s Oya Y. Rieger. It is part of the Charleston Briefings: Trending Topics for Information Professionals series. This briefing discusses the history and role of preprints—scholarly manuscripts posted by the author(s) to a repository or platform to facilitate open and broad sharing of early work without any limitations…
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January 5, 2022
Providing Library Services for Higher Education in Prison
An Interview with Jessica Licklider and Jeannie Colson
In a previous blog post I interviewed Jeanie Austin of the San Francisco Public Library about their new book on providing library services to incarcerated people. With the restoration of Pell funding for incarcerated students set to take place in 2023, the field of higher education in prison (HEP) is currently grappling with how to prepare for this long-awaited expansion of funding and opportunity, and academic libraries that wish to serve this student group must likewise prepare to meet…
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December 20, 2021
Leading by Diversifying Collections
Announcing a New Project to Support Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion in Academic Libraries
As academic libraries seek to meaningfully engage with calls to improve practices related to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) it is important that the library’s collections align with that mission. Yet, Ithaka S+R’s recent survey of library directors found that most libraries have not developed criteria for evaluating and making decisions related to the diversity of their collections. A library-wide strategy for diversifying collections also involves leveraging staff and resources in new ways…
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December 15, 2021
Building Sustainable Data Sharing Communities
Announcing the Participants in an NSF-Funded Incubation Workshop
Across the country and around the world, communities of researchers are voluntarily sharing data across disciplinary and institutional borders. Understanding the motivations, practices, and challenges faced by members of these communities is important to the National Science Foundation (NSF) and other funders seeking to promote and normalize data sharing and reuse. However, questions remain about how to best support data communities as they emerge and mature. Some of the most urgent issues involve documentation,…
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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…
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…
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December 7, 2021
Providing Library Services to the Incarcerated
An Interview with Jeanie Austin on Their New Book
Providing library services to people held in prisons and jails can be a challenging endeavor. Those who take on this work will need to navigate complex, and not always welcoming, corrections’ bureaucracies and face censorship or be themselves co-opted into censoring in ways that are antithetical to the ethical tenets of librarianship. Yet the information needs among incarcerated and detained people are immense given their limited access to the internet or other technologies…
December 1, 2021
Supporting Big Data Research
New Report Offers Recommendations for Stakeholders
As “big data” has moved from the margins to the center of a growing number of academic disciplines, how well are universities, funders, and publishers supporting researchers? To better understand how big data research is pursued in academic contexts, Ithaka S+R partnered with librarians at more than 20 colleges and universities, interviewing over 200 faculty members, to explore how researchers work with big data and identify the challenges they face. “Big Data Infrastructure at the Crossroads:…
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…
November 12, 2021
Three Questions for Deirdre Harkins
On November 1, Deirdre Harkins joined Ithaka S+R’s Libraries, Scholarly Communication, and Museums team through a collaboration with the Black Trustees Alliance for Art Museums (BTA). In this interview, she reflects on what brought her to BTA and what she hopes to accomplish during her fellowship. What attracted you to the BTA fellowship? I found BTA’s mission statement of increasing the inclusion of Black perspectives in museums especially compelling. It directly coincides with the research approach…
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…
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November 10, 2021
Unpacking the Effects of Increasing Pell Grants
The Pell Grant is America’s most prominent tool to promote college access and affordability for low- and middle-income students. With a substantial increase in the maximum Pell award under consideration by Congress, a natural question is how that increase is likely to impact the access and affordability goals of the program. The answer, it turns out, depends a lot on the college or university at which a Pell recipient uses the grant. In a new…
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October 21, 2021
Working with Libraries to Navigate the Streaming Media Environment
The ascendancy of the streaming format has implications for how educational content is used and purchased within universities, even if universities do not appear to be a priority market for media providers. The pedagogical possibilities for streaming content extend far beyond access to feature films and documentaries, providing, for instance, the opportunity to access a wide variety of academic conference presentations, or observe lab demonstrations. Within universities, academic libraries are taking…
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