Blog

What does it take to attract, develop, and retain employees who can adapt, grow, and thrive in the fast-changing world of academic libraries? In our latest issue brief, Deanna Marcum explores why libraries should consider a “talent management” approach as they seek to fill new positions and leverage the skills of their current staff. It’s a change that calls for a new mindset not only in the human resources department, but truly across the organization. Interested? Download…

Before the financial crisis of 2008, the typical answer to differentiating yourself in a job market crowded with bachelor’s degrees was to get yet more college by earning a master’s degree. But since the recession, enrollment in graduate school has been essentially flat as fewer students seem to want to take on the debt of going back to school or question the return on investment in a tough job market. A front-page article in the Wall Street Journal earlier this…

Last week, I had the privilege of attending the International Federation of Library Associations and Agencies annual conference in Cape Town, South Africa. Such gatherings make starkly apparent the wide variations in the resources available to libraries in different parts of the world, but they also give reason for optimism about libraries, generally. The theme of this year’s conference was “Dynamic Libraries: Access, Development and Transformation,” signaling the strong connection between development of a democratic society, economic development, and the…

The world of online learning presents some unpleasant surprises when it comes to sharing materials. Recently, a university librarian from a selective private institution told me a story that put a nice point on this issue. One of the university’s schools had recently launched a collaborative online degree with peer institutions. Faculty members teaching in the program contacted the library to ask for help with making course materials available to the online students. When the librarians explained to them that…

In 2008, John Immerwahr described an “iron triangle” constraining colleges and universities, in which cost, quality, and access exist in an “unbreakable reciprocal relationship, such that any change in one will inevitably impact the others.” According to this logic, making a college or university more accessible or trying to increase the quality of instruction would necessarily drive up institutional costs. Conversely, reducing expenditures would inevitably make an institution less accessible and undermine the quality of the education that a…

Since 2000, Ithaka S+R has run the US Faculty Survey, which tracks the evolution of faculty members’ research and teaching practices against the backdrop of increasing digital resources and other systemic changes in higher education. Starting in 2012, Ithaka S+R has offered colleges and universities the opportunity to field the faculty survey, and a newly added student survey, at their individual institutions to gain better insight into the perceptions of their faculty members and students. More than 70…

Over the past eight years, the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) has undergone a remarkable transition, from a tired campus that housed an unsung technical institute to a major presence in Australia’s largest city where learning and research draw the attention of students, the higher education community, industry, and the public. In our latest case study, “Making a Place for Curricular Transformation at the University of Technology Sydney,” authors Nancy Fried Foster and Christine Mulhern unpack the process through…

A couple of weeks ago, the New York Times’ Education Life section published a series of articles dedicated solely to incoming college freshmen. With advice on how to navigate the dining hall, when to move into one’s dorm, and how to manage helicopter parents, the articles imagined the typical college student as an 18-year-old who was entering a four year institution straight from high school, living on campus, and whose primary concerns centered just as much on making friends…

Ithaka S+R is launching a new research project to examine how organizational structure affects the academic library’s capacity for effective decision-making on major strategic issues. My interest in this topic draws from Ithaka S+R’s experiences helping more than 75 academic libraries survey their own faculty members and students as well as our other library consultations. Through these projects, it is clear that some libraries are better positioned to act on the research they conduct and the evidence they gather…

There is an unstated subtext to the growing calls for colleges and universities to lower their costs. When colleges and universities are asked to lower their costs, what they are really being asked to do is lower their costs without decreasing quality. There is no other way to square cost concerns with the other major demand on higher education: to increase completion rates. When we talk about costs, what we’re actually talking about is productivity—increasing output for the same or…

Alisa Rod and I had the pleasure of attending the 11th Northumbria International Conference on Performance Measurement in Libraries and Information Services, a biennial meeting held this year in Edinburgh, Scotland. Many people think of the Northumbria Conference as the British complement to the ARL Library Assessment Conference held in the US. The conference venue, Our Dynamic Earth, put us in the middle of excited children exploring oceans and rainforests on the one side and a spectacular view…

The discussion about MOOCs and their impact on higher education has changed dramatically in the last couple of years. The fear and foreboding that accompanied MOOCs’ explosive debut has dissipated. It seems that the MOOC storm has passed. Much of that hype was predicated on the expectation that these new free courses were going to replace traditionally delivered higher education and reduce the price of pursuing degrees. There was also a belief that these courses would undermine or “unbundle” the…

Over the past  year, Liam Sweeney, Deanna Marcum, and I have been working on a project with Mariët Westermann of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to examine the diversity of the staff of America’s art museums. Today, Mellon has published an introduction and overview of the diversity findings of the members of the Association of Art Museum Directors. In this project, we worked closely with the Association and its members to develop a questionnaire about staff diversity.

In a new NBER working paper released this month, economists from the University of Texas and Texas A&M scrutinize some of the factors motivating racial and ethnic differences in college application choices, using data from the entire population of high school graduates in Texas over the past two years. In disaggregating rather than lumping together minorities (as some other studies do), the authors find that Hispanic students are in particular less likely to apply to any college, even after…

As part of a panel organized for the recent annual conference of the American Library Association in San Francisco, I was invited to talk about future trends in higher education. This was something of a fool’s errand, I realize, since we are bombarded every day by the media with higher education’s most pressing challenges and opportunities:   Low completion rates New pedagogies that meet more of today’s students’ needs—online learning, competency-based education, etc. Need for a higher education ecosystem…

I was recently recalling a fantastic study by Ralph Wagner on The History of the Farmington Plan. It reviewed some of the most important efforts at collaboration among the US research libraries, especially in the post-war period, and analyzed their successes and eventual demise. I thought of this book as I was wondering if anyone has done a serious examination of collaboration in research university libraries. Cultures of collaboration, and their reflection in organizational design and governance, were on…

The concept of the “student swirl” was conceived in the 1980s to describe undergraduates who moved among institutions before earning a bachelor’s degree. Students who transferred often did so because they made a poor initial match with an institution, or encountered academic or financial problems along the way. But now there is a growing body of evidence that students might be making a deliberate choice to transfer institutions as part of their pathway to a bachelor’s degree. First there is…

At ALA Annual in San Francisco last month, one of the interesting panels that I attended featured the executive leadership of six library technology companies. The moderator, Marshall Breeding, started things off with a question about how each company’s business model helped it serve library needs. OCLC’s Skip Prichard spoke about his organization’s governance as a partnership of libraries, while ProQuest’s Kurt Sanford emphasized that because it is family-owned his organization can take a long-term perspective. I…

A recent study by Joshua Goodman, Michael Hurwitz, Jonathan Smith, and Julia Fox explores the relationship between siblings’ college choices. Using data from 1.6 million pairs of siblings who took the SAT between 2004 and 2011 they find that 31% of younger siblings apply to and 19% enroll in the same college as their older sibling. They also find that younger siblings are 16 percentage points more likely than their high school peers to enroll in four-year colleges if…

How do we ensure the long-term preservation of our print heritage even as our collections move more fully online? In “Taking Stock: Sharing Responsibility for Print Preservation,” Roger Schonfeld surveys the progress our community has made in the past decade, but warns against the conflation of collaborative print management and improved access to collections with preservation. While “we may have developed a strong network for managing down print, Schonfeld argues, “whether that will yield long-term preservation goals is quite…