Archive
Research Report
November 20, 2013
Biodiversity Heritage Library
Smithsonian Institution Libraries
Sustainable growth through collaborative partnerships The Biodiversity Heritage Library (BHL), created in 2006, is the result of a collaboration of ten natural history museum and botanical garden libraries seeking to digitize core taxonomic literature and to make it free and openly available throughout the world. Today, the BHL includes fifteen member institutions whose efforts have shaped a collection of over 60,000 titles. It has developed beyond project status to become a service that researchers in systematic biology have integrated into…
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…
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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…
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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)…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
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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…
Research Report
October 6, 2011
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2011
Launching a "Freemium" Model
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), a peer reviewed, open access online reference, draws its funding from investment returns from a project endowment, built from the financial contributions of academic libraries. When we first studied the project, it had made great progress toward its goal of building a $4.125 million endowment, but it faced uncertainty over the extent to which the economic downturn in 2008 would affect its investments. In the two years since then, as endowment support has not…
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…