Publications

Far too many students in the United States start their postsecondary education without being able to demonstrate the skills and knowledge deemed necessary to succeed in college-level math. Colleges and universities have traditionally dealt with this problem by placing students in full-semester developmental courses for which they must pay full tuition but do not receive college credit. It has become clear, however, that this approach has serious drawbacks, as students who start out in remediation are far less likely to…

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…

In recent years, a promising conversation about change at community colleges has emerged. Employing the language of redesign and reinvention, this conversation emphasizes comprehensive, broad-sweeping reform, and calls for a reorientation of community college missions around student learning and student success. Though it is hard to disagree that improving student outcomes is desirable, the traditional enrollment and funding models for community colleges make a true institutional “reset” difficult. Understanding how institutions have successfully gone about redesigning their operations and culture…

Background: the emerging role of data management in research libraries I first became aware of research data management as a frontier area of expertise for libraries and librarians almost 10 years ago. Tony Hey was one of the first to popularize the term ‘e-science’ and the idea that librarians had a role to play in managing research data.[1] This call might have stirred little interest at another time. But at least two things were happening around then that…

Summary of Findings This report provides our preliminary analysis of evidence generated from the planning period and first iteration of CIC Consortium courses. It includes a summary of our findings, followed by a description and presentation of a good portion of the data for those interested in delving deeper. It is important to note that these courses finished very recently, and we (like the faculty members involved) are still processing what we have learned. We have amassed a considerable mass…

Libraries continually struggle with how to make the best use of their space, and collaborative study spaces have been added to support the perceived requirements for group projects. The University of Nevada, Reno (UNR) wanted to know what kind of spaces students actually need to do their work, and brought in Ithaka S+R’s senior anthropologist, Nancy Fried Foster, to help them explore this question. Using the methods of design anthropology, collecting artifacts and conducting interviews, the Ithaka S+R and UNR…

Sometimes, large lessons can be learned from the travails of small institutions. This is, we believe, true of the dramatic sagas of two very different private educational institutions: Sweet Briar College in Virginia and The Cooper Union in New York. The near-demise of Sweet Briar (now attempting to renew itself, but with uncertain prospects) and the struggles of Cooper Union (with big issues of both policy and governance) have much to teach us about the challenges facing both many small…

With 58 schools that enroll more than 800,000 students annually, the North Carolina Community College System (NCCCS) is the third largest system of higher education in the nation.[1] In 2010, NCCCS embarked on SuccessNC, a strategic initiative focused on sharing best practices, developing performance-based student success metrics, and testing system-wide policies to improve student access and success across all NCCCS schools. The SuccessNC initiative states that its ultimate target is increasing “the percentage of students who transfer, complete…

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…

Scanning the social needs and economic realities faced by institutions of higher education in 2008, John Immerwahr described an “iron triangle” constraining colleges and universities. Immerwahr suggested that the three points of this triangle—cost, quality, and access—exist in an “unbreakable reciprocal relationship, such that any change in one will inevitably impact the others.” According to this logic, making a college or university more accessible or trying to increase the quality of instruction would necessarily drive up institutional costs. Conversely, reducing…

The University of Technology Sydney (UTS) is committed to research and learning in technology-based disciplines, such as engineering and information technology, and fields that rely heavily on technology, such as design, architecture and building. Located in the center of Sydney, Australia, the university aims to achieve world-class status through embedding of advanced technologies across the curriculum, strong academic performance in science, engineering and technology, orientation to industry and professions, and alignment with Australian economic and educational priorities.[1] Over…

Thank you Bernie for inviting me to close the second Preserving America’s Print Resources summit meeting by taking stock of our progress in North America.[1] Even as I will raise questions about roles and responsibilities during the course of my talk, I am reminded that many in this room have been working on this issue for many years. Let’s recognize the print preservation leaders, so many of you here today, who are heroes of our generation’s efforts to…

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…

Georgia State University (GSU), a public university in Atlanta with nearly 33,000 undergraduates, has dramatically improved its rates of student success over the past decade. GSU’s six-year graduation rate has increased from 32 percent in 2003 to 54 percent in 2014.[1] During the same period, GSU has made a concerted effort to increase enrollment for traditionally underserved students. Remarkably, the share of its students who are Pell eligible nearly doubled, from 31 percent in 2003 to 58 percent…

Instead of the rich and seamless digital library for scholarship that they need, researchers today encounter archipelagos of content bridged by infrastructure that is insufficient and often outdated. These interconnections could afford opportunities to improve discovery and access. But in point of fact, the researcher’s discovery-to-access workflow is much more difficult than it should be.[1] …researchers’ expectations are being set not by improvements relative to the past but rather by reference to consumer internet services A different paper…

For the past decade, the conversation about technology’s potential to transform higher education has grown louder and larger, encompassing more voices, opinions, and topics, and driving changes at a global scale. Participants in this discussion speculate about the possibilities for Massively Open Online Courses (MOOCs) to make quality education more broadly accessible to an international set of learners, deliberate over the value of leveraging business analytics to help students through degree programs, and debate the impact of technology-enabled learning on…

Courses that incorporate online learning are increasingly a fact of life for American college and university students.[1] The share of postsecondary students in the United States who took at least one online course has increased every year for the past decade—to a high of 34% in the fall semester of 2012.[2] Even as the prevalence of online learning continues to grow, however, there remains a dearth of rigorous research done on the learning outcomes associated with…

In Virginia and elsewhere, higher education faces an unstable future. Demographic, economic and technological changes are driving transformation in all that we do. Higher education – access to it, knowledge created and disseminated through it, and outcomes produced by it – will be the key to innovation and prosperity. At the same time, public higher education faces an unprecedentedly challenging landscape as it seeks to fulfill its public purposes and responsibilities. Its transformative potential for our nation is at risk. The risk…

The past two decades have seen increasing pressure for greater transparency about student learning from both within and outside higher education. Internally, there is a desire to understand and improve the efficacy of curriculum, pedagogy, and student support. Externally, there is a desire to hold institutions—particularly public institutions—accountable. As a result, in the early 2000s the major higher education accreditors began to review colleges’ processes for setting student learning outcomes, assessing those outcomes, and responding to the results.[1]…