Publications

Over the past several years, OERs have gained significant traction across higher education, driven by a combination of grassroots campus efforts and state agencies of higher education or system-wide initiatives. The rationale behind these efforts has been clear: to alleviate the financial burden on students by reducing the cost of course materials. But OERs offer other advantages as well, serving as a catalyst for instructional innovation and helping to create a more inclusive learning environment. However, the question of sustainability…

Since 2021, people across the political spectrum have become preoccupied with questions of free speech and censorship on college campuses, and state legislators have driven the proliferation of new policies that limit spending and programming related to DEI and alter academic autonomy or shared governance arrangements. Against this backdrop, we included a short block of questions centered on academic freedom in a national survey of US instructors at four-year colleges and universities.

This landscape review focuses on the link between higher education, civic engagement, and democratic attitudes and behaviors. We explore three research questions: 1) What is the impact of postsecondary education on civic engagement and democratic attitudes and behaviors? 2) How have researchers defined, operationalized, and measured civic engagement in the context of higher education? 3) How are postsecondary institutions and key stakeholders institutionalizing civic engagement as part of their curricular and co-curricular programming?…

The things that get measured by an organization are a tell for what matters to the organization. Librarianship has been grappling with an underrepresentation of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color (BIPOC) librarians for decades, and while libraries have developed a plethora of recruitment initiatives, the numbers appear to have not changed meaningfully, remaining static over the decades. A contributing factor may be that demographic information about the profession is not routinely measured and reported.

Since 2010, Ithaka S+R has conducted the Library Survey on a triennial basis with the overarching goal of tracking the perspectives, priorities, and leadership strategies of library deans and directors at four-year academic institutions. This study is designed to provide library and other higher education leadership with a high-level overview of the topics that are at the forefront of library leaders as they conceptualize the role, strategic alignment, and value proposition of academic libraries on campuses.

Five thousand, six hundred and ninety-nine archivists and memory workers across the United States took the time to share their experiences within the archives profession by completing the A*CENSUS II All Archivists Survey. The All Archivists Survey, fielded 17 years after the original A*CENSUS collected foundational data for the field, provides a measure of how far the field has come in nearly two decades as well as introduces new or expanded areas of exploration.