Publications
Research Report
January 17, 2023
Strengthening Mississippi’s Economic Future Through Postsecondary Investment
As Mississippi prepares to support the statewide postsecondary attainment goal, understanding the returns to higher education is crucial to determining where to invest resources. Ithaka S+R has partnered with the Woodward Hines Education Foundation to provide Mississippi policymakers, advocates, and legislators with information they need to make strategic investments in postsecondary education that can increase attainment of high-value postsecondary credentials, especially amongst lower-income Mississippians, people of color, and residents in rural communities.
Issue Brief
January 5, 2023
Copyright and Streaming Audiovisual Content in the US Context
Copyright law includes special rights for research and teaching, including the fair use right, which can help address gaps between the educational activities that technology facilitates and the exclusive rights copyright grants to authors. In this brief, we review how US copyright law currently applies to streaming content for educational and research purposes and explore the opportunities for academic libraries.
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Research Report
November 16, 2022
The BTA 2022 Art Museum Trustee Survey
The Characteristics, Roles, and Experiences of Black Trustees
The Black Trustee Alliance for Art Museums (BTA) has partnered with Ithaka S+R to examine the experiences and demographics of art museum trustees from museums in the US, Canada, and Mexico. Through a shared interest in representation in the arts, BTA and Ithaka S+R fielded the Art Museum Trustee Survey to board members in the fall of 2021. The report investigates the characteristics, roles, and experiences of Black trustees in North American art museums.
Research Report
November 16, 2022
Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey 2022
With support from the Mellon Foundation and in partnership with AAM and AAMD, Ithaka S+R conducted a third cycle of the Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey. As museums have struggled with revenue losses due to the pandemic, many in the field expressed concern that museums would grow less diverse. This study shows that the opposite is true. Findings shed light on the trajectory of demographic changes and the impact of the pandemic on staffing.
Issue Brief
November 16, 2022
Holistic Credit Mobility
Centering Learning in Credential Completion
In this issue brief, we introduce holistic credit mobility as a framework for making sense of contemporary student mobility and devising solutions that center the success of mobile students with multiple forms and sources of validated learning. In the sections that follow, we define holistic credit mobility and highlight strategies to support its effective deployment throughout postsecondary institutions and systems.
Playbook
November 9, 2022
Leading by Diversifying Collections
A Guide for Academic Library Leadership
Academic libraries build collections in the context of their parent institutions—primarily to support the institution’s research, teaching, and learning mission. They also build collections that document and preserve the cultural and scientific heritage of our society to represent a wide range of perspectives. In these efforts, universities and their libraries are developing approaches that address calls for greater diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) with a focus on creating space for and the perspectives of historically marginalized groups.
Research Report
October 27, 2022
Art Museum Director Survey 2022
Documenting Change in Museum Strategy and Operations
In April 2022, with funding from the Kress Foundation and the Mellon Foundation, and in partnership with the Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD) and the American Alliance of Museums (AAM), Ithaka S+R launched the second iteration of the Art Museum Director Survey. One hundred and eighty-one art museum directors completed the attitudinal survey, sharing perspectives about the institution they represent, as well as the museum sector as a whole.
Research Report
September 27, 2022
Fostering Data Literacy
Teaching with Quantitative Data in the Social Sciences
Dylan Ruediger, Danielle Miriam Cooper, Angela Bardeen, Liesl Baum, Shmuel Ben-Gad, Shaun Bennett, Kathleen Berger, Laura Bonella, Ryan Brazell, Symphony Bruce, Louise Buckley, Trevor Burrows, Scout Calvert, Patricia Condon, Renata Curty, Hilary Davis, Eleta Exline, Julia Feerrar, Emily Finch, Elizabeth Foster, Melanie Gainey, Nikhat Ghouse, Joseph Goetz, Becca Greer, Kelly Grogg, Hannah Gunderman, Samantha Guss, Michele Hayslett, Yan He, Ann James, Erin Jerome, Barb Kern, Jessica Kleekamp, Jesse Klein, Stefan Kramer, Andrew Lee, Cynthia Levine, Ken Liss, Andrew Lundeen, Kimberly MacVaugh, Wendy Mann, Clarence Maybee, Steve McGinty, Bethany McGowan, Kayla McNabb, Samantha Minnis, Jennifer Moore, Shawn Nicholson, Kayla Olson, Christie Peters, Jeff Phillips, Julie Piacentine, Nathaniel Porter, Megan Potterbusch, Mallary Rawls, Miaomiao Rimmer, Gayle Schaub, Eric Schuler, Dorris Scott, Gang Shao, Emma Slayton, Kendra Spahr, Lisa Spiro, Jasmine Spitler, Ryan Splenda, Amanda Thomas, Amanda Tickner, Emily Treptow, Jane Yatcilla
“Fostering Data Literacy: Teaching with Quantitative Data in the Social Sciences” explores why and how instructors teach with data, identifies the most important challenges they face, and describes how faculty and students utilize relevant campus and external resources. Full details and actionable recommendations for stakeholders are offered in the body of the report, which offers guidance to university libraries and other campus units, faculty, vendors, and others interested in improving institutional capacities to support data-intensive instruction in the social sciences.
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Research Report
August 30, 2022
Borrowing During a Time of Crisis
Examining Institutional Debt During the Great Recession and COVID-19
Although a great deal of attention is paid to student debt, colleges and universities have increased their institutional debt substantially over the past several decades. While institutional borrowing is an important tool colleges can use to meet strategic goals, unchecked or irresponsible debts can undercut a college’s ability to adequately serve students. Ithaka S+R conducted a mixed methods study, with the generous support of the TIAA Institute, to better understand how institutional borrowing decisions are made during periods of crisis.
Research Report
August 22, 2022
A*CENSUS II All Archivists Survey Report
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.
Issue Brief
August 18, 2022
Post-Baccalaureate Bridge Programs
An Underutilized Tool for Strengthening Faculty Diversity
Eugene Tobin, Daniel Rossman, Elaine Vilorio, Christy McDaniel, Martin Kurzweil, Catharine Bond Hill
Over the last 50 years, the US has experienced significant shifts in its racial and ethnic makeup, making it a much more racially diverse country than it was a half century ago. The racial and ethnic composition of the higher education system has shifted too. In spite of this progress, various forms of racial bias, socioeconomic inequality, and academic gatekeeping continue to limit access of students from underrepresented minority (URM) and low-income backgrounds to higher education’s resources and potential benefits.
Research Report
August 9, 2022
Leveraging Data Communities to Advance Open Science
Findings from an Incubation Workshop Series
Several recent studies have indicated that large numbers of researchers in many STEM fields now accept the value of openly sharing research data. Yet, the actual practice of sharing data—especially in forms that comply with FAIR principles—remains a challenge for many researchers to integrate into their workflows and prioritize among the demands on their time. In many disciplines and subfields, data sharing is still mostly an ideal, honored more in the breach than in practice.
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Research Report
July 19, 2022
The Effectiveness and Durability of Digital Preservation and Curation Systems
In August 2020, with funding from the Institute of Library and Museum Services (IMLS), Ithaka S+R launched an 18-month research project to examine and assess the sustainability of these third-party digital preservation systems. In addition to a broad examination of the landscape, we more closely studied eight systems: APTrust, Archivematica, Arkivum, Islandora, LIBNOVA, MetaArchive, Samvera and Preservica.
Research Report
July 14, 2022
Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey 2021
The Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey has tracked the changing research, teaching, and publishing practices of faculty members within higher education triennially since early digital transformation at the turn of the century. This project has aimed to provide actionable findings to help colleges and universities, among other relevant stakeholders such as academic libraries, learned societies, and scholarly publishers, make evidence-based decisions for their planning and strategy.
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Issue Brief
July 7, 2022
Lost and Found: State and Institutional Actions to Resolve Stranded Credits
This brief provides a roadmap for stakeholders interested in the underlying practices that create stranded credits and what can be done to improve them. To begin, we provide specific definitions of the terms and practices implicated in the creation of stranded credits. While researchers and policy leaders have increased their attention on the problem of stranded credits, this brief lays out in detail how they are created, why they matter, and what can be done to better balance the interests.
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Research Report
June 9, 2022
Streaming Media Licensing and Purchasing Practices at Academic Libraries
Survey Results
Researchers have undertaken several important efforts to track how libraries are approaching the streaming media market and troubleshoot the challenges they are encountering, focusing especially on strategies for balancing patron demand with managing costs. Building on those data gathering efforts, this report shares findings from the most comprehensive survey to date of academic library streaming media approaches at four-year institutions in the US and Canada.
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Research Report
May 25, 2022
Overseeing the Overseers
Can Federal Oversight of Accreditation Improve Student Outcomes?
Since the passage of the Higher Education Act (HEA) of 1965, the federal government has relied on the accreditation process to ensure quality at postsecondary institutions receiving federal dollars. Ithaka S+R began a pilot study in 2021 to assess the feasibility of using publicly available data on the accreditation process and outcomes to evaluate the impact of federal oversight mechanisms on institutional and student outcomes. In this report, we provide an overview of accreditation in the US.
Issue Brief
May 16, 2022
Can Evidence-Based Teaching Techniques Address the Education Debt that Students of Color Are Owed?
Evidence-based teaching strategies (EBTs) have become increasingly popular, as the practices have been linked to positive academic outcomes and should, theoretically, benefit all students regardless of their background. In this brief we identify the areas where research on EBTs lacks a critical, equity-minded orientation and offer suggestions on how future research can utilize an equity-first mindset. We present strategies that can be used by practitioners who hope to orient EBTs towards creating equitable learning environments for their students.
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Issue Brief
April 28, 2022
Supporting Low-Income Students with SNAP
States and institutions of higher education have, until recently, been approaching the problem of student food insecurity in separate, sometimes contradictory ways. While some institutions have developed wrap-around assistance programs for low-income students that have improved retention and completion rates, the students with the most needs often attend institutions with the fewest resources to support them. Developing state policies that support low-income students will not only increase the number of successful graduates but also improve students’ work-readiness and earning potential.
Research Report
April 12, 2022
Aligning the Research Library to Organizational Strategy
Ithaka S+R was commissioned by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and the Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) to examine the strategic directions of research universities with the objective of identifying common themes that research libraries can consider in aligning to advance the research and learning mission both individually and collectively. This project draws on interviews and other forms of engagement conducted in 2021 with more than 60 university leaders across research libraries in the US and Canada.