Publications

Introduction The Council of Independent Colleges (CIC) Consortium for Online Humanities Instruction began in 2014 with the support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to determine if small, independent colleges could collaborate in developing online, upper-level humanities courses that would give students at these institutions a broader range of courses from which to choose. The success of the first Consortium (2014–2016) motivated the Mellon Foundation to support a second Consortium that was formed in the summer of 2016 with…

As part of the National Historic Preservation Fund, Save America’s Treasures awarded nearly 500 grants between 1999 and 2010 through the National Park Service, National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Institute of Museum and Library Services to preserve collections that embody the American story. The collections contain major parts of the nation’s artistic, social, and intellectual history.  The impact of these grants has not been assessed in any comprehensive way, and one of the…

The CIC Consortium for Online Humanities Instruction began in 2014 with the support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The success of the first Consortium motivated the Mellon Foundation to support a second Consortium that was formed in the summer of 2016 with teams of faculty members and administrators from 21 institutions that were selected through a competitive process.[1] Each institution is represented by a four-member team including a senior academic administrator, two full-time faculty members in the…

The Council of Independent Colleges, a membership organization of more than 700 institutions, aims to support independent colleges and universities and their leaders as they advance institutional excellence and help the public understand private education’s contributions to society. CIC members, historically, have taken considerable pride in their offerings of highly personalized instruction for their students. As online learning began to be discussed in the mainstream media, CIC members considered the implications of this new form of pedagogy for their institutions.

Conventional conceptualizations of the “typical” college student as an eighteen-year old, full-time, residential student poorly match reality. Roughly 70 percent of today’s college students are “nontraditional students,” meaning that they are over the age of 24, commute to campus, work part or full-time, are financially independent, or have children. Some enter college with only a GED, while others are reentry students with an assemblage of credits from various institutions. Many of these students are low-income, the first in their families…

This Issue Brief has been adapted from Deanna Marcum’s keynote address at the CRL Collections Forum held in Chicago on April 14, 2016.[1] For as long as humankind has been recording thoughts and ideas, we have been concerned about the technologies and processes that will ensure preservation of those records. Consider Cassiodorus, a high official in the Ostrogothic Kingdom in Italy in the Sixth Century, AD, who wrote about the invention of papyrus with all of the enthusiasm…

The National Federation of Advanced Information Systems (NFAIS) honored me at its annual meeting in February with the Miles Conrad Award. I had an opportunity to give a lecture on any topic of my choosing. Leadership for the library profession has been a career-long interest, so I focused on what kind of leadership is required for the digital environment. In this Issue Brief, I include the highlights of the talk. In the February 29, 2016 issue of The New Yorker,…

The phrase “scholarly communication” appears often in the description of library roles and responsibilities, but the function is still new enough that it takes different forms in different institutions. There is no common understanding of where it fits into the library’s organizational structure. This landscape review of offices of scholarly communication grows out of research originally conducted by Ithaka S+R for the Harvard Library. Dr. Sarah Thomas, Vice President for the Harvard Library, University Librarian and Roy E. Larsen Librarian…

The Council of Independent Colleges (CIC), created in 1956, is a membership organization of nearly 700 independent, non-profit colleges and universities. The organization exists to support college and university leadership, advance institutional excellence, and enhance public understanding of private higher education’s contributions to society. To achieve these goals, CIC hosts and develops programs, seminars, and conferences that help institutions improve the quality of education, administrative and financial performance, and institutional visibility. Economic pressures have forced presidents of independent colleges to…

When library deans and directors make public statements, they invariably acknowledge staff as the library’s most important asset. It seems that this platitude is becoming increasingly relevant as academic and research libraries make the transition from collections-centered to services-centered organizations. The staff line is the largest budget line in most library budgets, and staff will determine the success of the 21st century library. Now is the time to consider the ways in which we think about new and better ways…

For the entirety of my professional career, it has been a hobby of most practitioners to fret about library education. Practitioners have complained that the schools of library and information science were not preparing professionals as well as they might for particular segments of the profession—school libraries, public libraries, academic libraries, etc. The professional schools have responded that their job is to prepare students to work in all kinds of information organizations, not just libraries, and that these skills are…

Public research universities are under great pressure to increase access, lower costs, and improve instruction, even as they face diminishing financial support from the states they serve. Against this backdrop, Ithaka S+R, with funding from Lumina Foundation, undertook a study of ten institutions in the Public Flagships Network (PFN). Over the course of the 2013/2014 academic year, Ithaka S+R interviewed 214 individuals, ranging from presidents and provosts to key administrative officers and staff, to department chairs and faculty. Members of…

COUNTER-compliant usage statistics, service assessments, peer benchmarking—librarians have been gathering different types of data for some time, using data to measure the usage of their resources, the quality of their services, and how they stack up against similar institutions.  But could library leaders collect data differently? In this Issue Brief Deanna Marcum and Roger Schonfeld suggest an approach where library leaders start not with the data that are easy to gather, but with the problems they are trying to solve.  What does…

How might public flagships meet some of their most pressing challenges? Earlier this month, Ithaka S+R completed a study on behalf of Lumina Foundation to  understand the growing but contested role of technology-enhanced education at these universities.  In this issue brief, Deanna Marcum, Ithaka S+R's Managing Director, offers an abbreviated look at the study's findings on how public flagships are addressing the need to increase access to education, contain costs, improve student learning outcomes, and increase institutional efficiency.

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…

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…

Building a comprehensive digital collection and creating a vital revenue stream through commercial partnerships The American Antiquarian Society (AAS), an independent research library and scholarly society, has a clearly defined mission: to collect everything published and printed in America prior to 1877. The AAS has traditionally operated from a small endowment and contributions. But in 2002, Readex, a publisher of digitized historical primary source materials, began to reissue AAS-based microform products in digital form, paying the Society royalties that quickly…

This report aims to address one of the biggest challenges facing libraries and cultural heritage organizations: how to move their special collections into the 21st century through digitization while developing successful strategies to make sure those collections remain accessible and relevant over time. Through a cooperative agreement as part of the National Leadership Grants Program, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) funded the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), in partnership with Ithaka S+R, to undertake in-depth case studies…