Blog

Yesterday, I attended Columbia University’s Book History Colloquium, which is sponsored by the Rare Book and Manuscript Library, where Andrew Stauffer, associate professor of English at the University of Virginia, spoke about “Traces in the Stacks: 19th-Century Book Use and the Future of Library Collections.” Observing the trend in academic and research libraries towards moving tangible collections offsite, and sometimes de-accessioning them, in favor of digital versions, Stauffer is concerned about the implications for scholarship. Stauffer offered a richly illustrated…

On Monday, October 13, 2014, William G. Bowen delivered the opening address at Rice University’s De Lange Conference, “Technology: Its Potential Impact On The National Need To Improve Educational Outcomes And Control Costs.” We are pleased to publish it here as an Ithaka S+R issue brief. Bowen, who is president emeritus of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and also president emeritus of Princeton University, was the founding chairman of JSTOR/ITHAKA and continues to serve on ITHAKA’s board. The paper explores…

The future of the monograph is of great interest to many humanists, scholarly publishers, and academic librarians. Last year, I wrote an issue brief, Stop the Presses: Is the monograph headed toward an e-only future?, that suggested the monograph’s digital future would prove to be much more complicated than what has been experienced thus far for journals. Yesterday, ARL’s fall forum, provocatively titled Wanted Dead or Alive – The Scholarly Monograph, served to confirm that the possible transition…

Last week, my new issue brief on discovery came out. Since its release, there has been some very interesting discussion on the topic. I’ve tried to bring together some of the commentary from Twitter and blogs here and to suggest some future directions these imply for our community. A point of departure for the paper is an analysis of library directors’ responses to the strongly worded statement “It is strategically important that my library be seen by its users…

In the age of the ubiquitous single search box, what role do libraries play in the discovery of scholarly resources? In this Issue Brief, Roger Schonfeld explores how the vision that the library should be the starting point for research—a vision many library directors hold—is often in conflict with the practices of faculty and students.  As users migrate to other starting points, librarians could invest in ways to bring them back. But there is also an opportunity for librarians to re-think…

Academic authors in the humanities and social sciences often wait three or more years to see the first reviews of their scholarly monographs. Why does it take so long? As Oona Schmid, director of publishing at the American Anthropological Association (AAA), describes in our latest issue brief, it is because book reviewing still relies on a print-centric system. Thanks to funding from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, the AAA is now developing a prototype to completely re-imagine the book review…

The Library Assessment Conference took place last week in Seattle, a valuable forum for those gathering and using evidence in support of library management and planning. I attended, with my colleague Alisa Rod, Ithaka S+R’s surveys coordinator. The program included a diverse set of presentations on topics from information literacy to space planning. Ithaka S+R’s local surveys were also featured in a number of sessions on the program. Developing the Ithaka S+R Student Survey Alisa and Heather Gendron,…

Last week at the Library Assessment Conference in Seattle, I gave a talk on “Vision, Alignment, Impediments, Assessment.”  As academic libraries face a variety of strategic issues, I argued, they need to consider how to implement evidence-based decision making processes more broadly in their institutions.  There’s a significant role for the assessment community in building such processes, and as libraries continue to invest in assessment, they have the opportunity to use data to address their challenges. I reviewed some…

In 2012, Ithaka S+R partnered with Jisc and Research Libraries UK to conduct the inaugural UK Survey of Academics. The report of findings was published in May 2013, and it is freely available on our website. This project was the first in several steps to internationalize Ithaka S+R’s US Faculty Survey. It developed rich findings for the UK higher education sector about discovery, open access, the print to electronic transition, research methods, and other issues of strategic relevance. As…

New York, NY—During the same month that The New York Times declared 2012 the “Year of the MOOC,” Ithaka S+R partnered with the University System of Maryland (USM) to determine the feasibility of using MOOCs in new ways—incorporating MOOCs and other online technologies into undergraduate classrooms.  The results of that study are available today:  Interactive Online Learning on Campus: Testing MOOCs and Other Platforms in Hybrid Formats in the University System of Maryland. Over the course of a year,…

Today, NISO is releasing the recommended practice for its Open Discovery Initiative. This important initiative is intended to bring greater order to the indexed discovery services that have achieved a market penetration of roughly three-quarters of US academic libraries, according to the most recent Ithaka S+R US Library Survey 2013 (pages 53-54). With such a high share of libraries positioning indexed discovery services as the primary discovery interface for their users, it is essential to address the concerns—both…

The University of Rochester is set to open a new data visualization lab with a direct link to the University’s supercomputers. Ithaka S+R provided support in the design phase by collecting information through interviews and workshops and identifying key requirements for the space itself and for the technology to be installed in the space. The Visualization-Innovation-Science-Technology-Application (VISTA) Collaboratory lab will be used in many ways including research in the sciences, engineering and optics as well as the humanities and social…

Digital Humanities has captured the imagination of many faculty, staff and students in recent years. Experts in the field, from veterans of Digital Humanities Centers to library digitization units, know well the challenges that digital projects can pose, just to keep content and software up to date and relevant. As more scholars experiment with building digital humanities resources, how are their host institutions approaching the challenge of supporting these efforts over time? Ithaka S+R has just published Sustaining the…

COUNTER-compliant usage statistics, service assessments, peer benchmarking—librarians have been gathering different types of data for some time,  using data to measure the usage of their resources, the quality of their services, and how they stack up against similar institutions.  But could library leaders collect data differently? In this Issue Brief Deanna Marcum and Roger Schonfeld suggest an approach where library leaders start not with the data that are easy to gather, but with the problems they are trying to solve.  What does…

Today, I participated in a meeting convened by the College Art Association (CAA) as part of the project led by Patricia Aufderheide and Peter Jaszi to develop a code of best practices in fair use for the visual arts. CAA is convening ten of these sessions as one input into the development of this code. You may have seen the paper that this project produced earlier this year, on Copyright, Permissions, and Fair Use among Visual Artists and the…

In the 2013 US Library Survey, a very high percentage of respondents from doctoral and master’s institutions (94% and 87% respectively) noted that their universities offer some type of online courses.  And roughly half of respondents from doctoral and master’s institutions consider “providing special services for students enrolled in online or hybrid courses” to be a high priority. To best develop such services, librarians need intelligence about how their faculty approach online teaching.  With this in mind, the University…

During the last year, Ithaka S+R interviewed more than 70 faculty members, curators, librarians, visual resources professionals, and museum professionals in order to learn how art historians’ research practices are evolving in the digital age. Today, we are pleased to announce the publication of that study’s results: Supporting the Research Practices of Art Historians. Intended primarily for the museums, libraries, academic departments, and visual resources centers that support research in art history within the U.S., this project focused on…

How might public flagships meet some of their most pressing challenges? Earlier this month, Ithaka S+R completed a study on behalf of Lumina Foundation to  understand the growing but contested role of technology-enhanced education at these universities.  In this issue brief, Deanna Marcum, Ithaka S+R’s Managing Director, offers an abbreviated look at the study’s findings on how public flagships are addressing the need to increase access to education, contain costs, improve student learning outcomes, and increase institutional efficiency.

Helping users find content is one of the fundamental services that academic libraries have historically provided. As we have tracked in the Ithaka S+R survey of library deans and directors, it is also an area where there have been important and fast-moving changes. In the 2010 survey, library directors saw discovery as an area for increased investment, and many libraries subsequently put money into new-to-the-market index-based discovery services that promised to bring their collections together into a single search…

At the end of March, OCLC Research, the Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC), and Ohio State University, hosted a very interesting symposium on print collections management. The symposium’s focus was on how collections of print books might be more effectively managed given changing usage patterns and needs for print books, and changing priorities for the allocation of library spaces. The symposium’s jumping-off point was a new research report by Brian Lavoie and Constance Malpas, which analyzes Ohio State…