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Ithaka S+R is gearing up for our eighth launch of the US Faculty Survey this fall. This national survey has yielded longitudinal data on scholarly research and teaching behaviors across a variety of institutional and disciplinary contexts on a triennial basis since 2000. To maximize the value of this initiative for higher education leaders, scholarly societies, academic libraries, and publishers who have come to rely on these data, especially in light of the…

We gratefully acknowledge the many individuals who devoted their time, energy, and expertise to the 2021 summer institute and the insights shared below, including Randall Bass, Heidi Elmendorf, Mark Joy, Susannah McGowan, and Brittany Toscano Gore of Georgetown University, Katie Brock and Ulili Emore of the University of Texas at Austin, and Nathaniel Holmes and Richard Peters of Xavier University of Louisiana. The ongoing work of the ATI academic equity community of practice would not be possible without them. Introduction…

There was a “before” and there will be an “after,” but how do we evaluate success while at our current locus—somewhere in the nebulous middle of a prolonged pandemic?  More than a year into the pandemic, many evaluations are being conducted using measures of success that were established in a radically different context. The environment has shifted, and the goals and definitions of success for items under evaluation—everything…

The COVID-19 pandemic highlighted and in many cases widened socioeconomic and other disparities in higher education, making evidence-based approaches that support underserved students more important than ever before. One project that aimed to promote equity and student success across a set of large, public universities is Monitoring Advising Analytics to Promote Success (MAAPS). In 2016, the University Innovation Alliance (UIA) and its institutional members began testing the effectiveness of MAAPS, an intervention consisting of intensive, proactive, technology-enhanced…

Since 1996, the “Big Deal” has enabled academic libraries of all sizes to license bundled access to a publisher’s journal at a significant discount off the list prices. Over the years, as Big Deal spending has come to occupy a greater and greater share of materials budgets, libraries have come to question the value of their Big Deal subscriptions, with some opting to cancel or significantly alter their existing arrangements. Today we are thrilled to announce a…

As university budgets face considerable strain and new models for providing open access to scholarly communication proliferate, academic libraries are increasingly pursuing alternatives to the “Big Deal” journal subscription model, including cancellation. But how are these strategies affecting researchers and what do they make of them? Over the past year Ithaka S+R has been studying the impact of Big Deal cancellations on its users in partnership with 11 academic libraries. Previous research has focused primarily on…

We’re excited to announce the first publication in a new case study series from the American Talent Initiative’s Academic Equity Community of Practice, highlighting the ways in which colleges and universities have leveraged data and evidence-based research to enhance equity-related projects on their respective campuses. In Fall 2020, 37 members of the American Talent Initiative (ATI), an alliance of high-graduation-rate colleges and universities committed to expanding…

We are excited to announce that Ithaka S+R has been awarded grant funding from the National Science Foundation to support the development of infrastructures for data sharing within data communities in collaboration with the Data Curation Network.  “Leveraging Data Communities to Advance Open Science,” will bring together scientists and information technology professionals for focused discussions about initiating and sustaining data communities.  A unique opportunity to leverage data communities…

In order to be eligible to access federal student aid programs, colleges and universities are required to receive authorization from the state or states within which they operate. The rise in online postsecondary programs over the last decade created increasingly complicated administrative challenges to state authorization: institutions that sought to enroll “out-of-state” students in their online programs needed to seek authorization from every state in which those students resided. To streamline this process, in 2014 higher education leaders formed the…

Black culture is regularly marginalized in institutional libraries and archives. This phenomenon has been replicated virtually with the introduction of digital technologies and social media, and is in stark contrast with how Black users drive digital trends. For the past decade or more, a growing community from technical, academic, and cultural backgrounds have built a new discipline of study around research and practice in this space (the Black Web) so that Black culture online could receive the same—or better—attention and…

This fall, we are looking forward to fielding our triennial US Faculty Survey. This will be the eighth cycle of this long-standing research initiative through which we examine faculty research and teaching perspectives and practices across a variety of institutional and disciplinary contexts. Through this ongoing work, we have now mapped for over two decades the evolving attitudes and behaviors of scholars on a range of topics, including the discovery and access of scholarship, research dissemination and preservation, instructional methods…

In a series of blog posts, I have discussed the origins and developments of postsecondary efforts to address institutional connections with slavery. This final blog post will discuss how institutions can push beyond their historical entanglements with slavery to address the current legacies of institutional racism. While a growing number of institutions have sponsored historical inquiries examining their own institutional involvement with slavery in the 18th and 19th centuries, and many have issued statements decrying systemic…

As the higher education sector begins to address the adverse effects of the pandemic on enrollment, institutions and policymakers alike have begun to turn their attention to a pernicious form of debt that could be preventing over six million students, especially low-income students and students of color, from re-enrolling and earning their degrees. This form of debt prevents students from accessing their transcripts at institutions they attended in the past, leading those previously earned credits to become “stranded” at…

Last year, we released a landscape review delving into how different metrics of student success are currently prioritized, defined, quantified, and used within the community college sector—examining how traditional metrics of success, like those aligning with typical college objectives like graduation, retention, enrollment, and course completion, are more often prioritized and required for funding, accountability, and accreditation purposes. Subsequent interviews with institutional research and effectiveness officers provided even…

On April 13th, we convened a panel of leaders in the library field—Trevor A. Dawes, Patricia Hswe, and Kaetrena Davis Kendrick—to discuss newly-released results from our national survey of academic library directors on the impact of movements for racial justice on library leadership. While our study served as a jumping off point for the event, we discussed—with panelists directly and with attendees using the #LibJusticePanel hashtag—many long-standing issues related to equity, diversity, inclusion, and anti-racism. We invite you…

Fostering data and code sharing among scholars is an important component to fostering a culture of open research—but how can this work be done most effectively? At Ithaka S+R we are exploring the crucial contextual elements that optimize research data sharing. We’ve found that data communities—formal or informal groups of scholars who share a certain type of data with each other regardless of disciplinary boundaries—provide important clues to understanding how research data sharing works. Identifying and supporting scholarly communities…

On April 1, Kara Bledsoe joined Ithaka S+R’s Libraries, Scholarly Communication, and Museums team. In this interview, she reflects on what brought her to Ithaka S+R and what she hopes to accomplish through her work with us. What attracted you to Ithaka S+R? My background is in management consulting for cultural organizations. I drafted strategic plans, facilitated visioning workshops, and evaluated clients’ operations to help them optimize the balance between market forces and their missions. Most of the research…

Over the last several months, we’ve shared Ithaka S+R strategies for ensuring inclusivity in writing and selecting demographic questions—key steps in the early stages of the data collection planning process. But inclusivity concerns don’t stop once data collection has begun, but continue when a survey is put into the field, an interview is conducted, or administrative data collection is facilitated.  Ensuring proper care in collecting and…

Each spring, the National Humanities Alliance (NHA) organizes an annual meeting and an accompanying national advocacy day, in which representatives from most states meet with congressional offices to make the case for federal funding of the humanities. In 2020, 184 individuals representing 41 states held 287 meetings with congressional offices on Capitol Hill. Ithaka S+R is committed to supporting humanists in their work, through projects such as measuring the value of a liberal arts education, the analysis of the…

The second iteration in Ithaka S+R’s Teaching Support Services project investigates the teaching practices and support needs of instructors who work with primary source materials. Today we are excited to publish the project’s capstone report. Still in the pandemic but beginning to glimpse life on the other side, now is an opportune time to begin to envision not just the future, but the many potential futures…