Blog

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…

ITHAKA hosted our annual Sustainable Scholarship Conference in October, bringing together librarians, publishers, scholarly society leaders, and a variety of others interested in how higher education is changing as a result of new technologies. This year’s theme was “The Question of Quality: New Forms of Grading, Credentialing, and Peer Review in the Digital World.” Videos of the presentations are now available online.  Here are some highlights: Keynote: Kevin Guthrie, president of ITHAKA, focused on some of the key…

Last week I presented at the 2012 Library Assessment Conference in Charlottesville, Virginia, where we previewed some of the results from two projects that are part of our Research Support Services for Scholars program. These projects take a closer look at the research support needs of historians (funded by the NEH in the US) and chemists (funded by the JISC in the UK). The conference proceedings led me to reflect on some of issues in the assessment…

This week William G. Bowen, ITHAKA trustee and Ithaka S+R senior advisor, delivered the Tanner Lectures on Human Values, hosted jointly by Stanford’s Center for Ethics in Society and The Office of the President at Stanford University. These lectures are now available as an ITHAKA publication, The ‘Cost Disease’ in Higher Education: Is Technology the Answer? Declining public support and steadily rising costs have caused tuition to rise faster than inflation (and family incomes) for many years. Concerns…

Ithaka S+R has this morning launched the 2012 cycle of our triennial Faculty Survey for US higher education. We are sending invitation emails to tens of thousands of faculty members across the US to ask them to participate, and we are grateful to the many faculty members who will take the time to respond. Their responses will allow us provide colleges and universities, libraries, scholarly societies, and academic publishers with insight into the evolving attitudes and practices of scholars…

Kevin Guthrie’s column in the new edition of Educause Review summarizes a number of findings from the Ithaka S+R report “Barriers to Adoption of Online Learning Systems in U.S. Higher Education.” He writes, “Digital and network technologies are commoditizing some basic aspects of teaching while they are simultaneously unbundling various aspects of a faculty member’s role.” It strikes me that the underlying drivers here have important implications for institutions as well as for faculty. This “commoditizing” and…

Nearly every library recognizes the importance of global collaboration, but did you know that there is a Japan-US library program that has been operating for 30 years? The Kanazawa Institute of Technology’s Library Roundtable celebrated its 30th anniversary last week, and I had the pleasure of taking part in the program. The Japan-US library program started as a thank-you gesture from the director, Dr.  Sakai  of the KIT Library, who served as deputy director of the National Diet Library after…

At the ALA Annual Meeting this past weekend, I participated in two workshops that, while on very different topics, provide an interesting snapshot of how libraries are changing today. ACRL is continuing its interest in analyzing the value of academic libraries by hosting a workshop with library leaders to develop a future research agenda for this area of work. Spearheaded with Megan Oakleaf’s major literature review on the value of academic libraries and continuing more recently with summit meetings…

Ithaka S+R’s ongoing survey research projects form a cornerstone of our efforts to understand how academic behaviors and practices are changing, and how service providers adapt. These surveys include the triennial Ithaka S+R Faculty Survey – last run in 2009 and now in planning for fall 2012 – as well as our Library Survey, which was most recently fielded in 2010 and focuses on the strategies that library administrators are pursuing for their libraries. In addition to coverage in…