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Over the past decade, collective impact initiatives have emerged in cities and communities all across the country. Collective impact refers to a cross-sector collaboration which brings together a broad spectrum of organizations to solve a specific social problem in a community. Collective impact efforts are typically geographically-bounded, to either a city, county, or region, and are different from traditional collaboration in that they are designed to drive sustainable change in entire systems. In addition to the organizations…

Today, Ithaka S+R is releasing a report in conjunction with The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation examining employee diversity within the libraries that are members of the Association of Research Libraries. This is the latest part of a collaborative series between Mellon and Ithaka S+R to support efforts in US higher education and cultural institutions to identify diversity strategies. This report, intended to serve as a benchmark against which future progress can be measured, finds that substantial…

New York, NY, August 30, 2017— A study released today by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and Ithaka S+R suggests that research libraries struggle to build a diverse staff, with results showing a majority of leadership positions are held by white employees. Though gender ratios remain constant – with women in the majority in all employment categories ­–employees of color, regardless of position,  appear to face a steeper climb towards advancement than their white colleagues. The survey, conducted by Ithaka…

The past year has been a momentous period for preprint-driven open access. Elsevier has made two major acquisitions, of SSRN with its edited research networks and of bepress with its Digital Commons institutional repository service. Springer Nature sibling Digital Science has worked to develop its presence too, expanding figshare as not just a data repository but as a full institutional solution and more…

In today’s economic climate, where there is an increasing demand from students and families for academic programs that are likely to lead to well-paying jobs, the pressure to innovate is high for many higher education institutions. This pressure is especially high for small independent colleges when part of the innovation discussion involves the restructuring of existing course offerings to increase enrollment and reduce instructional costs – which may run counter to their longstanding mission of offering small classes and providing…

Open educational resources (OERs), which are licensed as freely available for people to use and repurpose, have become a driving force as the education sector looks to reduce costs. OERs are associated with numerous benefits for students, including savings of an average of $128 per course, higher course grades, and greater likelihood of course completion. As a recent Ithaka S+R case study highlighted, the University of Maryland, University College (UMUC) implemented an OER program that saved students…

Institutions of higher education vary widely in how they define, collect, and store their students’ data, making the collection of student-level data across institutions a challenging task. Since September 2015, Ithaka S+R has served as the independent evaluator of the Monitoring Advising Analytics to Promote Success (MAAPS) study, an intensive proactive and technology-enhanced advisement intervention for first-time low-income and/or first-generation students across the 11 four-year public universities that make up the University Innovation Alliance. We recently completed the…

Last week’s article in The Guardian from Alterline’s Ben Hickman, entitled “University libraries need to start putting the student first,” proposed that university libraries need to put evidence on student needs and practices at the heart of their decision-making. The author included a number of suggested areas for improvement – for example, the provision of ample space, friendly engagement with librarians and library staff, and accessible resources. As UK higher education transitions towards taking a more student-centric approach as…

Recently ITHAKA president Kevin Guthrie and Ithaka S+R managing director Catharine Bond Hill sat down with the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Goldie Blumenstyk to discuss trends in higher education. Which innovations show the most promise and which are over-hyped? Join the conversation about adaptive learning technologies, data analytics, MOOCs, and OERs, and share your comments below.

We are today in the midst of a profound reconfiguration of all sorts of information industries, impacting everything from journalism to entertainment. Libraries and scholarly information providers are not alone. Last week’s news of the bepress acquisition by Elsevier, which I first covered in a business analysis suggesting its strong strategic fit along with some potential risks, took the academic library community by storm. As the dust begins to settle, this is a…

Earlier this year, Ithaka S+R was awarded a $2.46 million, multi-year grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation to develop, test, and scale new models of entry-level math instruction in higher education. Working closely with the project partners including TPSE Math (Transforming Post-Secondary Education in Mathematics), Acrobatiq, William E. Kirwan Center for Academic Innovation, the Urban Institute, as well as the two institutions that were part of a pre-pilot study during the 2016-17 academic…

To say that the community college presidency is in flux is no overstatement. Many existing community college presidents have been reaching retirement age at a time when both the traditional presidential pipeline and rigorous leadership training programs have narrowed. At the same time, there has been a wave of community college president resignations and terminations, leading to warranted concerns about a shortage of qualified candidates who can tackle the increasingly challenging role. Leadership matters. And high-quality sustained leadership is important…

Millions of Americans receive postsecondary training through programs that don’t lead to an associate’s or bachelor’s degree. What do these programs offer?  Who enrolls in them?  How do the students who complete these programs fare? These are some of the questions Jessie Brown and I sought to answer when we embarked on a research project for the Commission on the Future of Undergraduate Education at the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. The resulting paper, “The Complex Universe…

You’ve developed a thoughtful questionnaire, gathered responses, generated meaningful, insightful findings, and now want to share these results to more widely inform decision-making. How do you ensure that these findings are communicated effectively to the right individuals? In spring 2016, Penn State University fielded the Ithaka S+R Undergraduate Student Survey and faced the challenging task of communicating findings from the survey, which covered perspectives from 2,000+ students using 37 libraries across 20 campuses. The Ithaka S+R local surveys, which…

The latest Ithaka S+R report on agriculture scholars summarizes the diverse research being undertaken in across the agricultural sciences and suggests some ways forward for the agricultural information community. One key theme in the report focuses on the work undertaken by researchers in the agricultural sciences around data management. The breadth of the field is reflected in the variety of methods and data generated by scholars, ranging from genetics to economics to field-based biology. Across these domains, a common…

While enrollment of international students has grown considerably in the last decade in the United States, investigations into their information practices and library needs are limited in number and are rarely conducted in a manner that enables comparative analysis of international and domestic graduate students. At the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign (UIUC), international graduate students represent a significant portion of the total number of graduate students as well as of the total number of international students…

Ithaka S+R is proud to be a new sponsor of the UCLA Senior Fellows program and we are delighted that Brian Schottlaender, retiring University Librarian at the University of California, San Diego, has agreed to lead the program. I have been tangentially connected to this leadership program for most of my career. When I was the Library Education program officer at the Council on Library Resources in the early 1980s, we funded the first class of the UCLA Fellows…

Earlier this year, Ithaka S+R published results from the US Library Survey 2016, which examines strategy and leadership issues from the perspective of academic library deans and directors. One of the key findings from the study was that library directors are pursuing strategic directions with a decreasing sense of support from their institutions, and a recent study on the perceptions of library value from the perspective of provosts…

The U.S. quality assurance system—focused mainly on accreditation as a threshold for federal financial aid eligibility—has done a poor job of assuring quality. Barely 60 percent of first-time students complete a bachelor’s degree and 40 percent complete an associate’s degree at the institution where they started. These overall results mask a wide range of outcomes across institutions. As a result, many students, parents, and policymakers question the value of their massive investment in postsecondary education. Can the accreditation process be…

Today Ithaka S+R releases its in-depth report on the research activities of agriculture scholars as part of its ongoing program to explore the research activities of scholars by discipline. For Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Agriculture Scholars, we explore the breadth of agriculture research activities in U.S. higher education towards fostering information services that will support those endeavors. As the report highlights, agriculture is a particularly compelling field because of its broad scope and wider societal relevance,…