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I’m thrilled to announce Rebecca Griffiths’s return to the S+R team, which she’ll be joining as program director for online learning. Rebecca was a founding member of Ithaka, initially helping to create Aluka, and then leading the launch of the Strategic Services practice (now part of Ithaka S+R). In addition to supporting business planning efforts for clients, she co-authored several of Ithaka’s influential papers on the sustainability of digital projects, uses of open source software in higher education, and…

Nature News & Comment recently published an article that focused on some of the ways that the scholarly community could benefit from the creation of a unified identity system for researchers. Researcher disambiguation might be able to simplify the process of applying for grants and submitting papers for publication. It also opens up a whole range of possibilities with regard to measuring scholarly productivity, tracking new forms of scholarship, and using data to learn more about scholarly communications.

One of the best things about the Association of Research Libraries spring meetings is that they are held in different parts of the country and hosted by member libraries in these areas. This year’s meeting was held in Chicago, and even though we met in the Downtown Marriott, we were transported by bus on the evening of Wednesday, May 4 to the University of Chicago for a reception and tour of the new Mansueto Library. It was worth the trip!…

Online learning is hardly a novel concept anymore. It’s hard to find a recent or current college student who hasn’t taken at least one course online. Whether or not they like the experience is another question—some seem to thrive on the flexibility and freedom of working at their own pace, others miss the face-to-face interaction with a live instructor. The real question is not whether online learning is here to stay—it almost certainly is—but whether it is making a fundamental…

Ithaka S+R’s recent report “Barriers to Adoption of Online Learning Systems in U.S. Higher Education” was the result of a months-long research process with input from many different colleges and universities. Our project team was led by Ithaka S+R senior advisor Dr. Lawrence Bacow, a respected educator and advocate for access to higher education, who retired from his post as president of Tufts University in 2011. After the publication of the report, I asked Dr. Bacow to reflect…

Since 2007, Ithaka S+R and the Strategic Content Alliance (SCA) have been working together to examine the challenges that the academic and cultural heritage communities face in making sure that the digital resources they create will endure and provide value well beyond their initial creation. These short videos offer an introduction to our research on the sustainability of digital resources, and include useful guidance for those managing projects at universities, museums, and libraries. Feel free to view, embed or…