Archive
Blog Post
July 30, 2013
Notes from the field: Digital Humanities 2013
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…
Research Report
April 8, 2013
US Faculty Survey 2012
The Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey has focused since its inception on capturing an accurate picture of faculty members' practices, attitudes, and needs. In the fifth triennial cycle, fielded in fall 2012, the survey focused on research and teaching practices broadly, as well as the dissemination, collecting, discovery, and access of research and teaching materials. Findings from this cycle of the Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey will provide colleges and universities, libraries, learned societies, and academic publishers with insight into…
Blog Post
February 12, 2013
New Ithaka S+R Research Support Services Project in Art History
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…
Blog Post
December 4, 2012
Art Books and eBooks
A Difficult Conversation?
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…
Blog Post
October 12, 2012
The ‘Cost Disease’ in Higher Education
Is Technology the Answer?
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…
Blog Post
September 10, 2012
Ithaka S+R Faculty Survey 2012 is being fielded for US higher education
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…
Blog Post
June 20, 2012
2010 Library Survey Dataset Now Available
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…
Blog Post
June 5, 2012
ORCID and Identity Management Systems
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.
Blog Post
May 30, 2012
Preservation on Display at University of Chicago’s Mansueto Library
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!…
Blog Post
May 22, 2012
Online Learning
A Zero Can Mean A Lot
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…
Research Report
May 1, 2012
Barriers to Adoption of Online Learning Systems in U.S. Higher Education
This Ithaka S+R report is a landscape review of important developments in online learning today. It is the first in a series that will provide leaders in higher education with lessons learned from existing online learning efforts to help accelerate productive use of these systems in the future. The goal of this research was to understand what benefits colleges and universities expect from online learning technologies, what barriers they face in implementing them, and how these technologies might be best…
Research Report
October 6, 2011
The National Archives (TNA) 2011
Enhancing the Value of Content through Selection and Curation
In 2008 we examined the activities of the Licensed Internet Associates program (LIA), a business operation within The National Archives (TNA) that licenses TNA’s holdings to commercial entities. Beyond providing direct revenue to TNA in the form of royalty income, the LIA program has played a major role in the rapid digitization of TNA’s documents at an extremely low cost, outsourcing the function to its licensing partners. In the face of a projected 25 percent cut in government funding over…
Research Report
October 6, 2011
V&A Images 2011
Scaling Back to Refocus on Revenue
V&A Images, the commercial image licensing unit of the Victoria and Albert Museum, had a difficult task: to generate profits through image licensing while also fostering the museum’s public and scholarly mission of providing access. In 2009, our study focused on the challenges of operating an image licensing business whose sustainability model depends on monetizing the same assets that are available for free. In part due to these challenges, the group expanded their scope in 2010 to include mobile app…
Research Report
October 6, 2011
The Department of Digital Humanities (DDH) at King’s College London 2011
Cementing Its Status as an Academic Department
In 2009 the Department of Digital Humanities (DDH), formerly known as the Centre for Computing in the Humanities (CCH), presented the model of a successful cross-disciplinary collective of digital practitioners engaged in teaching and research, with knowledge transfer activities and a significant number of research grants contributing to its ongoing revenue plan. Support from King’s College London to create the department was to be phased out after the results of the government’s 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE), which was expected…
Research Report
October 6, 2011
DigiZeitschriften 2011
A Niche Project at a Crossroads
DigiZeitschriften, a collection of digitized German language scholarly journals, has continued to successfully support its operations and generate a surplus through a combination of its subscription model and low cost base, thanks to its 14 partner libraries, which help to curate the content and seek grant funding as needed. Since we profiled this project in 2009, its website has been revamped, and Google and other search engines are now allowed to crawl some content for the first time. And yet…
Research Report
October 6, 2011
eBird 2011
Driving Impact through Crowdsourcing, Case Study Update 2011
In 2009 when Ithaka S+R first studied the sustainability model for eBird, a database of bird sightings, we highlighted its strong focus on the needs of its end users and the extent to which the Information Science Department, where it is housed, encouraged eBird’s project leaders to pursue entrepreneurial activities. The project leader and his three co-managers, who were selected because of their familiarity with the needs of both academic ornithology researchers and casual birding enthusiasts, have developed a range…
Research Report
October 6, 2011
Electronic Enlightenment (EE) 2011
Outreach or Outsource? The Benefits and Challenges of Partnership, Case Study Update 2011
In 2008 the Electronic Enlightenment launched efforts to transition to an institutional subscription model, part of its long-term plan for sustaining itself beyond the period of grant funding. Now housed at Oxford’s Bodleian Library and working with Oxford University Press as its sales, marketing and distribution partner, Electronic Enlightenment is still in the process of building its subscriber base, a task made more challenging by the impact of the recession on library budgets. This update reports on the challenges EE…
Research Report
October 6, 2011
Hindawi Publishing Corporation 2011
Growing an Open-Access Contributor-Pays Business Model
The original case study in 2009 explored Hindawi’s transition from a subscription-based journal operation to an all open access publisher, with the bulk of revenues derived from fees from authors rather than subscription charges. Because the company’s growth depends on the number of articles published each year, the company changed its focus from marketing to end users to developing new products, entering into partnerships with societies and other publishers, and creating a publishing experience for authors and editors that would…
Research Report
October 6, 2011
L’Institut national de l’audiovisuel 2011
Balancing Mission-based Goals and Revenue Generation
L’Institut national de l’audiovisuel (INA), the French national archive for audiovisual materials, is tasked with preserving France’s audiovisual heritage through ambitious goals for digitising, preserving, and sharing this content. In addition to the government funding that INA receives, its commercial activities support this work. This update examines Inamédiapro, the commercial rights licensing service, and ina.fr, the public website, and their complementary ways of monetizing the rich archival holdings in recent years, through a close examination of user needs and strategic…
Research Report
October 6, 2011
The Middle School Portal 2: Math and Science Pathways, National Science Digital Library 2011
The Challenges of Sustaining a Project as the End of a Grant Approaches
The original case study, "The Middle School Portal 2 (MSP2): Math and Science Pathways, National Science Digital Library: Early Sustainability Planning for a Grant-Funded Digital Library," profiled a new grant-supported initiative: a portal devoted to collecting high-quality teaching resources for use by middle school educators. The resource was part of the National Science Foundation’s National Science Digital Library (NSDL) program, a collection of online resources for educators in STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). In the first year of…