Publications
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
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
Revenue, Recession, Reliance
Revisiting the SCA/Ithaka S+R Case Studies in Sustainability
In 2009 Ithaka S+R investigated the sustainability strategies of twelve digital content projects in the higher education and cultural heritage sectors in the US, UK, France, Germany, and Egypt. Two years and one economic crisis later, Ithaka S+R, with the generous support of the JISC-led Strategic Content Alliance, decided to revisit the original twelve case studies to see how their models had held up, where weaknesses might be starting to show, and what new strategies project leaders were adopting in…
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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
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…
Research Report
October 6, 2011
Thesaurus Linguae Graecae® (TLG) 2011
How a Specialised Resource Begins to Address a Wider Audience
The Thesaurus Linguae Graecae® (TLG) provides an example of a specialized resource which draws on multiple revenue streams for its sustainability model. This collection of digitized ancient Greek texts is considered essential for scholars of the classics, which has allowed the project to successfully implement a fee for access despite appealing to a relatively small primary audience. In addition to subscription fees from institutions and individuals, income from an endowment and funding from the University of California, Irvine (where it…
Research Report
October 6, 2011
The National Archives (TNA) 2011
Enhancing the Value of Content through Selection and Curation
In 2008 we examined the activities of the Licensed Internet Associates program (LIA), a business operation within The National Archives (TNA) that licenses TNA’s holdings to commercial entities. Beyond providing direct revenue to TNA in the form of royalty income, the LIA program has played a major role in the rapid digitization of TNA’s documents at an extremely low cost, outsourcing the function to its licensing partners. In the face of a projected 25 percent cut in government funding over…
Research Report
October 6, 2011
V&A Images 2011
Scaling Back to Refocus on Revenue
V&A Images, the commercial image licensing unit of the Victoria and Albert Museum, had a difficult task: to generate profits through image licensing while also fostering the museum’s public and scholarly mission of providing access. In 2009, our study focused on the challenges of operating an image licensing business whose sustainability model depends on monetizing the same assets that are available for free. In part due to these challenges, the group expanded their scope in 2010 to include mobile app…
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
June 14, 2011
Funding for Sustainability
How Funders’ Practices Influence the Future of Digital Resources
"Funding for Sustainability: How Funders’ Practices Influence the Future of Digital Resources" offers an overview of funders' policies and practices, and provides a framework to assist funders and their grantees in thinking about the key elements of post-grant sustainability planning for digital resources. Over the past decade, philanthropic organizations and government agencies have invested millions of dollars, pounds, and euros in the creation of digital content in the not-for-profit sector. Their grants have facilitated major digitization efforts and encouraged innovative…
Research Report
April 11, 2011
US Library Survey 2010
Insights From U.S. Academic Library Directors
"Ithaka S+R Library Survey 2010: Insights From U.S. Academic Library Directors" aims to help academic libraries and other members of the higher education community understand the changing role of the library and how to strategically adapt to an increasingly digital environment. This survey focuses on the issues related to the strategies library administrators are pursuing for their libraries, the management of library collections, the development of new digital collections, and the creation of new services to meet changing user needs.…
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Research Report
January 1, 2011
Unlocking the Gates: How and Why Leading Universities are Opening Up Access to Their Courses
Over the past decade, top universities have begun to experiment with online courseware, leveraging one of their core assets—the undergraduate course—to reach out to new constituencies of learners. Ithaka S+R embarked on a project intended to chronicle the development of several key initiatives in this space, in an effort to provide senior academic leadership with actionable, strategic intelligence around activity in this emerging field. Two years of research has resulted in a scholarly monograph, Unlocking the Gates: How and Why Leading…
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Research Report
April 7, 2010
US Faculty Survey 2009
Key Insights for Libraries, Publishers, and Societies
This fourth in a series of surveys conducted over the past decade examined faculty attitudes and behaviors on key issues ranging from the library as information gateway and the need for preservation of scholarly material, to faculty engagement with institutional and disciplinary repositories and thoughts about open access. For the first time, we also looked at the role that scholarly societies play and their value to faculty. Following an initial introductory letter, survey questionnaire booklets were physically mailed to 35,000…
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Research Report
October 1, 2009
Documents for a Digital Democracy
A Model for the Federal Depository Library Program in the 21st Century
The Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Chief Officers of State Library Agencies (COSLA) retained Ithaka S+R to conduct a comprehensive study on the state of the Federal Library Depository Program (FDLP) and to recommend how to respond to changes in an increasingly digital, networked environment that have caused a decline in incentives for libraries to participate in the Program. Following a thorough examination of the Program’s current state, this report suggests a vision for the program: seamless, no…
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Research Report
September 1, 2009
What to Withdraw
Print Collections Management in the Wake of Digitization
As journals are increasingly accessed in digitized form, many libraries have grown interested in de-accessioning little-used print originals; but desires to repurpose space often come into conflict with concerns about preservation. “What to Withdraw: Print Collections Management in the Wake of Digitization” analyzes which types of journals can be withdrawn responsibly today and how that set of materials can be expanded to allow libraries the maximum possible flexibility and savings in the future. For journals that are principally accessed in…
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Research Report
July 14, 2009
Sustaining Digital Resources
An On-the-Ground View of Projects Today
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…
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Research Report
July 14, 2009
eBird 2009
A Two-sided Market for Academic Researchers and Enthusiasts
The Information Science Department at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology is home to eBird, a site where birdwatchers of all levels–from weekenders to academic researchers–can record their avian sightings and upload them for future use by scientists. The site serves a two-sided market: on one side, the birders who record and share their observations, and on the other side, the scientists who use that data for research. This project is notable for the level of interest it generates from users;…
Research Report
July 14, 2009
DigiZeitschriften 2009
Library Partnership and a Subscription Model for a Journal Database
DigiZeitschriften, a German language archive of scholarly journals, was created in 1999 with funding from the German Research Foundation. Since its launch as an online service in 2005, DigiZeitschriften has implemented a sustainability model that includes a partnership of libraries contributing time and expertise, and a financial model of institutional subscriptions that has more than covered its operating costs to date. This case study examines the decisions leading DigiZeitschriften to adopt this plan for sustainability, and explores the benefits as…