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This research is part of a multi-year, international exploration of the strategies being used to support digital initiatives over the long term. In 2008, we selected twelve projects to examine, analyzing the steps their project leaders have taken to achieve sustainability, with special attention paid to their strategies for cost management and revenue generation. "Sustaining Digital Resources: An On-the-Ground View of Projects Today" serves as a guide to the cases, outlining the stages that successful projects undertake in developing sustainability…

The challenges of digitizing, preserving and providing access to over 1,000 years’ worth of material held by The National Archives (TNA) are considerable. In recent years, TNA has developed a strategy to digitize content quickly though its Licensed Internet Associates program. These commercial partnerships, closely managed by TNA staff, have allowed the institution to digitize millions of pages of material at minimal direct cost. This case study explores the model developed by TNA in light of the opportunities that commercial…

Endowments are often thought of as a source of reliable support for established institutions such as universities and foundations, but in recent years online academic resources have also begun experimenting with the endowment model as a means of sustainable funding. The model holds forth the promise of guaranteeing access to a resource in perpetuity, with the investment returns from the endowment continuously generating funds to sustain the resource. Since 2004, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has successfully raised three-quarters of…

Online resources are often described and evaluated in terms of their ability to serve vast amounts of diverse content to wide audiences, but well targeted, specialized digital projects can have a profound effect on an academic discipline. The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae®, a digital corpus of over 12,000 works of Greek literature ranging from the ancient era to the modern age, has proven its value to scholars and has been able to convert that value into a sustainability model that incorporates…

For many museums and cultural institutions, the digital environment provides an exciting opportunity to expand access to their collections and enhance their brand. At the same time, the high costs of creating and maintaining digital collections lead some organizations to think about ways to generate revenue from these assets. V&A Images, a department of the Victoria and Albert Museum’s commercial trading company, licenses photographs of objects in the museum's collection for commercial, educational and personal use. The unit is tasked…

The networked digital environment has enabled the creation of many new kinds of works that are accessible to end users directly, and many of these resources have become essential tools for scholars conducting research, building scholarly networks, and disseminating their ideas and work. The decentralized distribution of these new model works can make it difficult to fully appreciate their scope and number, even for university librarians tasked with knowing about valuable resources across the disciplines. In the spring of 2008,…

The Ithaka S+R Library Survey 2006 was developed as a complement to our Faculty Survey 2006, exploring the attitudes and practices of librarians on a variety of topics, including the role of the library in faculty research, the print to electronic transition for scholarly journals, and the increasing prominence of electronic resources in research and teaching. In 2006, for the first time, we sought to offer extensive comparison between the faculty attitudes and practices to the attitudes and perspectives of…

The Ithaka S+R 2006 Faculty Survey sought to determine faculty attitudes and behaviors related to online resources, electronic archiving, teaching and learning, and related subjects. This survey built on our 2000 and 2003 surveys queried faculty members at four-year colleges and universities across the United States on their attitudes and behaviors on a variety of topics, including the changing role played by the library in their research, their evolving dependence on print and electronic research resources, publishing and dissemination preferences,…

There is no single formula that Online Academic Resources (OARs) can apply to achieve sustainability, no ‘one-size-fits-all’ plan that any organization can follow to reach a point of financial stability. There are, however, a variety of processes and approaches that can help to improve the likelihood of entrepreneurial success.  In an age when traditional content producers – including scholarly publishers and newspapers – struggle to maintain their financial footing in face of the challenges of the digital world, OARs cannot…

In a series of projects, we were asked by JSTOR to examine scholarly communication practices in various disciplines. The goals of this work were to understand how research is conducted and disseminated in select disciplines, and to identify the importance of different scholarly resources. In this project, we focused on the field of education.

The shift from print to electronic journals has raised significant challenges for libraries as they consider ways to ensure the preservation of these important digital resources. In September 2005, library directors from 17 universities and colleges met to discuss the current state of electronic journal preservation and endorsed a statement calling for “Urgent Action” to preserve scholarly electronic journals. In the months that followed, many library associations also endorsed this statement and its principal message that “in a scholarly environment…

Scholars have a vast range of opportunities to distribute their work, from setting up web pages or blogs, to posting articles to working paper websites or institutional repositories, to including them in peer-reviewed journals or books. In American colleges and universities, access to the internet and World Wide Web is ubiquitous; consequently nearly all intellectual effort results in some form of “publishing.” Yet universities do not treat this function as an important, mission-centric endeavor. The result has been a scholarly…

In a series of projects, we were asked by JSTOR to examine scholarly communication practices in various disciplines. The goals of this work were to understand how research is conducted and disseminated in select disciplines, and to identify the importance of different scholarly resources. In this project, we focused on the field of biosciences.

The transition of scholarly journals from print to electronic formats is affecting libraries and publishers in numerous ways. Based on several projects we had conducted on this transition, examining libraries and publishers alike, this article provided recommendations for library leaders about how best to manage the transition. Some key issues covered included responsive vs. strategic management of the process, special needs for journals from smaller publishers, infrastructure planning, and preservation considerations.

In a series of projects, we were asked by JSTOR to examine scholarly communication practices in various disciplines. The goals of this work were to understand how research is conducted and disseminated in select disciplines, and to identify the importance of different scholarly resources. In this project, we focused on the field of history.

Over the years, open source software (OSS) projects have been launched among higher education institutions with the aim of meeting the community’s needs more effectively and at less cost than do commercial options presently available. However, many in the community believe that uncertainty about future support and improvements hinders the widespread adoption of open source software. The creation of a new organization, which we refer to with the generic term “OOSS” (Organization for Open Source Software), has been proposed to…

Print book collections are facing significant transformation in response to mass digitization, remote storage, and preservation. As libraries look beyond the boundaries of their local print book collections to consider system-wide implications, they need to be equipped with data and analysis about the system-wide print book collection. This study, conducted in collaboration with Brian Lavoie of OCLC, provides a brief overview of the system-wide print book collection (defined as the combined print book holdings of libraries everywhere, as reflected in…

In a series of projects, we were asked by JSTOR to examine scholarly communication practices in various disciplines. The goals of this work were to understand how research is conducted and disseminated in select disciplines, and to identify the importance of different scholarly resources. In this project, we focused on the field of economics.

The increasing availability of digital images at colleges and universities has offered new opportunities for teaching and learning. In some disciplines and on some campuses, the opportunities are nothing short of transformative. In other cases, however, digital images have had only a modest impact. What are some of the factors associated with the more successful and transformative opportunities that digital images afford? For this study, we visited seven liberal arts college campuses and spoke with a variety of faculty members,…

This report summarizes what we learned about the evolving environment for digital printing and electronic distribution technologies, and how these technologies are impacting the academic press community. It attempts to weave together a wide range of perspectives into a coherent picture of the opportunities and challenges created by digital technologies for scholarly presses. It is based primarily on interviews with press directors, press staff, and other stakeholders who offered valuable perspectives on the academic publishing industry.