Blog

With generous funding from the Jisc-led Strategic Content Alliance (SCA), Ithaka S+R has developed A Guide to the Best Revenue Models and Funding Sources for Your Digital Resources. The report will support project leaders who are actively maintaining digital resources—and who seek funding models that support continued investment in their projects for the benefit of their users, over time. The world of digital creation has moved beyond major research institutions. It now includes museums, small historical societies, and local…

What role might librarians play in building the 21st Century research university? How can librarians effectively assess the impact of the expertise, services, and resources they deliver to the academic community? In our latest issue brief, Anne Kenney, the Carl A. Kroch University Librarian at Cornell University, explores how librarians can leverage the liaison model to demonstrate “that the library is more than a purveyor of content and that its expertise is an essential component of the academic knowledge infrastructure…

In our recent report on the 2013 US Library Survey, we noted that faculty members and library directors have different views on the role librarians play in information literacy education. Seventy-two percent of library directors agreed with the statement “Developing the research skills of undergraduate students related to locating and evaluating scholarly information is principally my library’s responsibility,” compared with just 22% of faculty. This is an area where participants in our local faculty survey have paid special attention…

In today’s edition of Inside Higher Ed, Carl Straumsheim writes about a new Council of Independent Colleges initiative that “will bring 20 of the organization’s members together in a Consortium for Online Humanities Instruction.” Ithaka S+R is delighted to serve as an advisor for this initiative. In this capacity Ithaka S+R is undertaking three roles: 1. Advising the CIC in the program design, helping to select members of the consortium, and contributing to communications with members. 2. Supporting…

On March 22, at the National Council of Public History meeting in Monterey, California, we will be presenting on “From Antiquarians to Deadheads. Lessons from ‘Searching for Sustainability: Strategies from Eight Digitized Special Collections’” with our colleagues James David Moran from the American Antiquarian Society and Robin Chandler of UC Santa Cruz (home of the Grateful Dead Archive Online).  We’re looking forward to learning from our audience of public historians how they approach the creation and ongoing preservation of…

The March 11 publication of the Ithaka S+R US Library Survey 2013 has garnered some immediate media coverage: Ian Chant, “Ithaka Study Shows Shifting Priorities Among Academic Librarians,” Library Journal. Jennifer Howard, “What Matters to Academic-Library Directors? Information Literacy,” The Chronicle of Higher Education. Carl Straumsheim, “Beyond eBooks,” Inside Higher Ed. Michael Todd, “State of the Stacks: Academic Libraries in a Digital Age,” Social Science Space.

What solutions might we find within our community to solve the problem of rising textbook prices? In our latest issue brief, Nancy Maron, Ithaka S+R’s Program Director for Sustainability and Scholarly Communications, looks at recent trends in textbook publishing and suggests that collaborations between university presses and academic libraries might yield a new breed of textbook more aligned to the needs of faculty and students. Interested? Download “Opening the Textbook: New Opportunities for Libraries and Publishers?”…

In our latest issue brief, Ithaka S+R Senior Anthropologist Nancy Fried Foster asks what it would be like to design academic libraries based not on precedent, but rather on everything we can learn right now about the work practices of the people who already use them.  Foster demonstrates how through participatory design we can build  a new type of library that considers both the practical needs of the community and the higher ideals of cultural institutions. Interested?…

Twenty-eight colleges and universities have signed on to administer Ithaka S+R’s Local Faculty Survey since we initiated this service, and librarians are beginning to tell us about the impact of the surveys on their campuses.  We recently caught up with Jenica Rogers, Library Director at SUNY Potsdam, who is using the survey results as she drafts her library’s next strategic plan.  SUNY Potsdam’s provost also plans to incorporate the data from the survey into her proposal to create a…

Last Sunday at ALA, I attended a presentation by Mary Somerville, University Librarian at the University of Colorado Denver, focusing on discoverability. Somerville recently co-authored a white paper on Collaborative Improvements in the Discoverability of Scholarly Content with Lettie Conrad of SAGE. I was glad to be able to participate as one of the interviewees in the Somerville-Conrad paper, which highlights some of the remarkable progress that has been made in discovery for scholarly purposes in recent years and makes…

Some 10 years ago, libraries were withdrawing enough of the journal backfiles that were being steadily digitized such that many could foresee a fairly complete print to electronic transition for these materials. There was a precedent for groups of libraries to ensure that among them the “last copy” of a given item would not be discarded, but the pace of withdrawals was clearly accelerating as individual libraries sought to find efficiencies in their use of space and related resources. In…

Last week, OCLC Research issued a compilation of its work to understand the “collective collection” and help libraries develop improved opportunities for managing this remarkable resource. This compilation, published as Understanding the Collective Collection: Towards a System-wide Perspective on Library Print Collections, contains a number of studies on the opportunities and implications of digitization, the print to electronic transition, and the ways in which the preservation imperative is changing. Many of these individual pieces will be worthy reading for anyone…

Stop the Presses: Is the monograph headed toward an e-only future? Can we expect the print monograph to disappear anytime soon? While the road to a fully digital future for scholarly monographs is not clearly in sight, the widespread availability of ebooks is already transforming researchers’ reading habits. As librarians and publishers consider their options, they must take into account how the usage behavior of academics is evolving. In this Issue Brief, Roger Schonfeld explores the challenges and possibilities if…

Rebecca Griffiths explores an intriguing and potentially high impact application of online learning: MOOCs in the Classroom? What happens when faculty are encouraged to adapt MOOCs intended for large global audiences for use in traditional classroom settings and curriculum? Can this “off label use” bring benefits like improved learning outcomes or the ability to educate more students in a given course? How can institutions make informed, evidence-based choices about the use of these technology enabled courses on their own campuses?…

The well-known Ithaka S+R Faculty Survey expanded beyond US faculty members in 2012 to include academics in the UK. We now have a fascinating window for assessing a variety of aspects of national higher education systems, affording us the opportunity to examine their comparative positioning and to consider a variety of possible policy interventions. Interested? Download “The Space Between”…

The use of large, comprehensive collections of printed books and journals has seen a massive decline at North American research libraries in recent years—an effect of the shift in scholarly publishing from an analog and print-based model to a digital and networked one. However, during these past two decades of radical change and energetic response, I believe we have missed a much more important shift, one that poses a more direct and existential threat than the one posed by the…

On July 15 I participated in the Digital Humanities 2013, an international conference hosted by Ken Price, Kay Walter, and their colleagues at the Center for Digital Research in the Humanities at the University of Nebraska—Lincoln. The four-day conference featured hundreds of compelling papers and posters about digital humanities theory, practice, projects, and tools. The day before the conference, I hosted a half-day workshop for eighteen digital project leaders seeking to develop sustainability plans. We had a diverse and engaged group…

This winter, as part of the Research Support Services program, Ithaka S+R is launching a new investigation of researcher practices and support services needs in the field of art history. Our goal is to examine the evolving needs of researchers on a field-specific basis in order to best understand how libraries and other information services providers meet these needs. We are grateful to the Getty Foundation and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation for their joint funding of this project. Our…

On Saturday, January 5, I had the opportunity to present findings from Ithaka S+R’s recent project on “Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Historians.” This was not the first presentation of findings from the project, but because this particular one took the form of a roundtable of four historians at the annual meeting of the American Historical Association, it was especially interesting. My colleagues on the panel were Francis X. Blouin (University of Michigan), Sharon Leon (George Mason University,…

In late September, I participated in “Art Books & Ebooks: A Difficult Conversation?” an event hosted by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City, organized by Ross Day, Collections Development Librarian at the Met, and focused on the future of books, e-books, and museum publishing in a digital age. Participants reflected on the changing environment for publishing and collections development and management, focusing on how monographs in the field of art and art history fit into or are…