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How do community college students define their own success? And what services do they think will help them succeed? To find out, we started with a radical idea: students are the experts. Last year, we interviewed dozens of students at seven community colleges on their goals and unmet needs. Today, we release a new report, Student Needs Are Academic Needs, on a…

Last week, a researcher from the University of Minnesota, Melissa Simone, shared an honest and frightening account of having bots infiltrate data gathered via an online research study. Within 12 hours of launching a survey, Simone found over 350 responses within the resulting dataset from bots. The process of identifying, screening for, and cleaning these data took hundreds of hours, she reported via Twitter. https://twitter.com/m_simonephd/status/1174010078632009728?s=20 Simone goes on to share a number of recommendations to prevent…

The American Talent Initiative (ATI), a coalition of high-graduation-rate colleges and universities committed to enrolling and graduating more low- and middle-income students, began a webinar series on special interest topics that we hope will elevate best practices in recruiting talented low- and moderate-income students. This summer, we hosted a webinar on the challenges of identifying, recruiting, and enrolling rural students. In this post, we summarize the key research and best practices presented on the webinar. What is the definition…

Successful data sharing crosses disciplinary silos. As Danielle Cooper and I argued in a recent issue brief, “data communities” — formal or informal groups of scholars who share a certain type of data with each other — emerge both within and across disciplinary boundaries. In order to understand how these data communities emerge — and to understand how they can best be supported — I’ve been seeking out leaders who are at the…

As scholars across disciplines increasingly turn to data-intensive research methods, academic libraries are considering how to adapt to meet the growing demand for research data instructional and advisory services. In a recent blog post, I observed that among R1 institutions in the United States overall staffing levels for research-data-dedicated library roles remain low, with over half of R1s sporting zero or one data librarian in their university libraries. But hiring dedicated data librarians…

Ithaka S+R is conducting a study on the relationship between academic libraries and campus museums, looking specifically at how they are governed and structured. With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we are in the process of inviting forty universities to participate, and over the Fall will interview the directors of both their museum and library in order to learn more about how these campus units operate in relation to the university and to one another.  …

For all today’s technological affordances, research data sharing remains a fundamentally social activity, dependent on building “data communities” from the ground up. Danielle Cooper and I argued as much in a recent issue brief, and since then, I’ve been seeking out pioneers who are at the forefront of efforts to grow emergent data communities in a variety of research areas. What does it take to get a successful data sharing movement off the…

Ithaka S+R is gearing up to update our local student surveys and we are now accepting expressions of interest from libraries to field the surveys in the spring 2020 semester. Our student surveys, which have been fielded at dozens of institutions since 2014, were developed to complement our local faculty survey. They cover the perspectives of undergraduate and graduate students on their objectives for pursuing higher education, their coursework activities, and their use…

When responding to a survey, do you ever have a sense of déjà vu, as though you already answered a very similar question a minute before? There might be a very good reason for the repetition. Across seven cycles of the US Faculty Survey and in our implementation of this instrument with more than 100 institutions across the globe, we have often found great value in approaching the…

A report published earlier this year from The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine disclosed findings from their recent assessment of reproducibility and replicability across different fields of research. Congress requested this collaborative study because of prolific media exposure on data misconduct and the inability of scientists to replicate important research. Additionally, there has been extensive media coverage of researchers who fabricate…

In 2016, Ithaka S+R began collaborating with libraries to extend our deep dives into the research needs of faculty in a variety of fields, including, Civil & Environmental Engineering, Asian Studies, Religious Studies, Public Health, and Indigenous Studies. Having partnered with 75 university libraries for these studies, last year, we began using a…

I’m thrilled to share that Ithaka S+R will be serving as an evaluator on the The Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship for Diversity, Inclusion & Cultural Heritage, a six-year program which aims to advance multicultural collections through innovative and inclusive curatorial practice and leadership at the Rare Book School. Through this fellowship, 45 fellows who identify with diverse racial or ethnic communities and/or who work primarily with collections that document minority, immigrant,…

Evolving data practices are re-shaping the academic landscape. Here at Ithaka S+R we’ve been tracking how scholars’ data support needs are evolving more widely through our triennial U.S. faculty survey and through deep dives into specific disciplinary practices, such as our recent report on Civil and Environmental Engineering. We’ve also uncovered how scholars’ work in data communities challenges the traditional disciplinary and institutional siloing…

How many data librarians does the average research university have? As data science methodologies are embraced by more and more academic fields–and as funders and administrators increasingly prioritize big data projects–academic libraries are staffing up to meet a growing demand. “Research data services” is a term that encompasses a broad range of support functions that help students and scholars conduct research with data. Some of these include: Directing users to…

Encouraging scholars to share research data with one another promises to increase research efficiency, reproducibility, and innovation. In a recent issue brief, Danielle Cooper and I argued for a new conceptual framework for understanding and supporting research data sharing: data communities. Data communities are formal or informal groups of scholars who share a certain type of data with each other, regardless of disciplinary…

Although over 87 percent of new community college students at the City University of New York (CUNY) intend to transfer and complete at least a bachelor’s degree, only 11 percent do so within six years. Whether and how a student’s credits articulate during transfer can have significant consequences for these students’ educational trajectory.  Students who transfer most or all of their credits are 2.5 times more likely to graduate compared to those who…

This fall, we will field the triennial Ithaka S+R Library Survey for the fourth time. The survey examines strategy and leadership issues from the perspective of academic library deans and directors, and through this project, we aim to understand the opportunities and challenges they face in leading their organizations. This project serves as a strong complement to our work with a variety of other communities of academic librarians and is intended to ensure…

In recent years, American art museums have faced a complex set of institutional demands, from scrutiny over ethical issues concerning donor relations, to hiring practices and efforts towards making the museum more accessible to the public. At the same time, museums enjoy a high level of public trust at a time when most American institutions are actively mistrusted. The sector produces over 700,000 jobs, adding over $50 billion to the…

In 2017, the University of Hawaiʻi (UH) was invited to participate in an international qualitative study organized by Ithaka S+R that sought to examine the research needs of Indigenous scholars. Our research team—Kawena Komeiji, Keahiahi Long, Shavonn Matsuda, Annemarie Paikai, and Kapena Shim—focused on how libraries can better support the research and teaching activities of Hawaiian Studies scholars whose scholarship contributes to the advancement and well-being of the Indigneous people of Hawaiʻi. There were several reasons…

Many higher education institutions are implementing advising interventions, if not complete redesigns, in an effort to advise their students in a more timely and targeted manner. While the approaches can take various forms, they have increasingly relied on technology to alleviate the burden of large caseloads by helping advisors easily and quickly identify which students need what type of support, and when. In an ambitious experiment, the 11 institutions that form the University Innovation Alliance (UIA) are testing such an…