Archive
Research Report
November 20, 2013
Vanderbilt Television News Archive
Vanderbilt University
Securing institutional support for a national mission On August 5, 1968, Vanderbilt University Libraries (then, the Joint University Libraries) began recording, preserving, and providing access to the news broadcasts of the three national networks. Since then, Vanderbilt has captured more than 40,000 hours of news broadcasts, creating the largest collection of American broadcast news in the world. Most remarkable about this case is the longevity of the Television News Archive. The Archive has always been financially challenged, but it has…
Research Report
November 20, 2013
Florida Folklife Collection
State Archives of Florida
Building User Engagement for a Sustainable Future The Florida Memory site first came online in 1996, and today it enjoys over forty-eight million page views each year from folklorists, historians, musicians, teachers, students, and others who use this rich collection. The Florida Folklife Collection, launched online in 2003, is one of Florida Memory’s most popular components. A digital repository of thousands of photographs and films, the collection is especially noted for its diverse mix of audio recordings, including vocal and…
Research Report
May 14, 2013
Ithaka S+R | Jisc | RLUK
UK Survey of Academics 2012
The UK Survey of Academics 2012, conducted by Ithaka S+R, Jisc, and Research Libraries UK (RLUK), examines the attitudes and behaviours of academics at higher education institutions across the United Kingdom. Our objective is to provide the entire sector, including universities, learned societies, scholarly publishers, and especially academic libraries, with timely findings and analysis that help them plan for the future. The Survey of Academics covers broadly the population of academics across the UK, as well as the opportunity to look…
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…
Tags:
Research Report
March 21, 2013
Current Status of Research on Online Learning in Postsecondary Education
As online courses continue to gain in popularity at colleges and universities throughout the country, knowledge about the effectiveness of this mode of instruction, relative to that of traditional, face-to-face courses, becomes increasingly important. A 2009 report by the U.S. Department of Education provides a meta-analysis of studies published up to 2008, examining the relative effectiveness of the different delivery formats in helping various populations of students learn different types of course content. This Ithaka S+R literature review complements that…
Topics:
Research Report
February 25, 2013
Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Chemists
In this report, we present the results of Ithaka S+R’s study of the scholarly practices of academic chemists. This study, funded by Jisc, presents information meant to empower research support providers in their work with chemists. The report covers themes such as data management, research collaboration, library use, discovery, publication practices, and research funding. The report describes the findings of our investigation into academic chemists’ research habits and research support needs. The digital availability of scholarly literature has transformed chemists’…
Research Report
February 21, 2013
Appraising our Digital Investment
Sustainability of Digitized Special Collections in ARL Libraries
Sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and conducted by Ithaka S+R, this study provides insight into how ARL libraries are managing and funding the hundreds of digitized special collections they have created and that they believe to be critical to their futures. This is the first survey of ARL institutions that specifically attempts to understand and benchmark the activities and costs of supporting these collections after they are created. By looking at questions of management, costs, funding sources,…
Research Report
January 29, 2013
Sustaining Our Digital Future
Institutional Strategies for Digital Content
A great deal of the digital content that libraries and scholars create is expected to endure. However, the responsibility of maintaining the ongoing operation and enhancement of this content remains undefined. With the generous support of Jisc, Ithaka S+R was able to examine the strategies that institutions have in place for supporting digital content resources beyond their initial construction and implementation. “Sustaining Our Digital Future” is both an assessment of the university environment as a host for digital content and…
Research Report
January 28, 2013
Sustaining Digital Content in Cultural Institutions
A Case Study of the Museum of Anthropology at the University of British Columbia
With generous support from the Canadian Heritage Information Network (CHIN), Ithaka S+R is examining the role played by the institutional host in supporting digital resources at museums. Over the past decade, investment from private and public funders has helped to create a rich landscape of digital resources in the cultural heritage sector. These projects, whether focused on digitization, born-digital content, or other tools, can be challenging to coordinate and costly to maintain. As cultural heritage institutions seek to expand their…
Research Report
December 7, 2012
Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Historians
This study, funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities, uncovers the needs of today’s historians and provides guidance for how research support providers can better serve them. We explore areas such as content discovery, information management, scholarly analysis, collaboration, library use, the writing process, professional interactions, and publication, among others. Our interviews of faculty and graduate students reveal history as a field in transition. It is characterized by a vast expansion of new sources, widely adopted research practices and…
Research Report
May 22, 2012
Interactive Learning Online at Public Universities
Evidence from Randomized Trials
Online learning is quickly gaining in importance in U.S. higher education, but little rigorous evidence exists as to its effect on student learning outcomes. In "Interactive Learning Online at Public Universities: Evidence from Randomized Trials," we measure the effect on learning outcomes of a prototypical interactive learning online (ILO) statistics course by randomly assigning students on six public university campuses to take the course in a hybrid format (with machine-guided instruction accompanied by one hour of face-to-face instruction each week)…
Topics:
Tags:
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…
Topics:
Research Report
October 6, 2011
University of Southampton Library Digitisation Unit 2011
Reimagining the Value Proposition
When the original case study was published in 2009, the staff of the BOPCRIS Digitization Centre at the University of Southampton’s Hartley Library had recently completed three large scale, grant funded digitization projects and was exploring different means of ensuring access to the digital content they had created. An early experiment with local hosting had shown that the Library was unprepared to deal with the on-going costs of maintaining these resources, and they turned to external content providers—ProQuest and JSTOR—for…
Research Report
October 6, 2011
Thesaurus Linguae Graecae® (TLG) 2011
How a Specialised Resource Begins to Address a Wider Audience
The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae® (TLG) provides an example of a specialized resource which draws on multiple revenue streams for its sustainability model. This collection of digitized ancient Greek texts is considered essential for scholars of the classics, which has allowed the project to successfully implement a fee for access despite appealing to a relatively small primary audience. In addition to subscription fees from institutions and individuals, income from an endowment and funding from the University of California, Irvine (where it…
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
Revenue, Recession, Reliance
Revisiting the SCA/Ithaka S+R Case Studies in Sustainability
In 2009 Ithaka S+R investigated the sustainability strategies of twelve digital content projects in the higher education and cultural heritage sectors in the US, UK, France, Germany, and Egypt. Two years and one economic crisis later, Ithaka S+R, with the generous support of the JISC-led Strategic Content Alliance, decided to revisit the original twelve case studies to see how their models had held up, where weaknesses might be starting to show, and what new strategies project leaders were adopting in…
Tags:
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…
Topics:
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…