Publications
Research Report
April 11, 2019
When Research is Relational
Supporting the Research Practices of Indigenous Studies Scholars
Danielle Miriam Cooper, Tanya Ball, Michelle Nicole Boyer-Kelly, Anne Carr-Wiggin, Carrie Cornelius, J. Wendel Cox, Sarah Dupont, Cody Fullerton, MaryLynn Gagné, Scott Garton, Ridie Wilson Ghezzi, Michelle Guittar, Kawena Komeiji, Sheila Laroque, Kayla Lar-Son, Kim Lawson, Deborah Lee, Janice Linton, Julia Logan, Keahiahi Long, Lorisia MacLeod, Shavonn Matsuda, Sara E. Morris, Lisa O'Hara, Rebecca Orozco, Annemarie Paikai, Michael Peper, Michael Perry, Gina Petersen, Verónica Reyes-Escudero, Anthony Sanchez, Kapena Shim, David Smith, Jennifer Sylvester, Jennifer Toews, Niamh Wallace, Amy Witzel, Desmond Wong
In 2017 Ithaka S+R launched a project to explore the changing research methods and practices of Indigenous Studies scholars across Canada and the US with the goal of identifying services to better support them in ways that are also beneficial to Indigenous communities more broadly. The project was undertaken by a cohort of research teams at 11 academic libraries with guidance from a group of advisors comprised of Indigenous scholars and librarians. Each research team in the cohort developed findings…
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Issue Brief
April 9, 2019
Challenges to Higher Education’s Most Essential Purposes
In his 2000 Romanes Lecture, entitled “At a Slight Angle to the Universe, the University in a Digitized, Commercialized Age,” William Bowen anticipated many of the challenges higher education faces today. His incisive summary of the most important purposes of higher education offers a useful framework for assessing how higher education is fulfilling its uniquely important role supporting a vibrant democratic society. Those responsible for higher education’s well-being, including presidents, administrators, trustees, faculty, and government policy makers, would do well…
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Issue Brief
April 9, 2019
Technology, Georgia Tech, and the Future of Learning
An Interview with Charles Isbell
I invited Charles Isbell, Professor of Computer Science at Georgia Tech to join me at the October 2018 Bowen Colloquium, a forward-looking gathering of college and university presidents and other leaders. In addition to his work in Artificial Intelligence, Professor Isbell is the Associate Dean in the College of Computing responsible for overseeing Georgia Tech’s Online Master of Science in Computer Science (OMSCS). Our conversation covered a wide area, from the unsustainable costs of traditional modes of instruction to his…
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Issue Brief
April 4, 2019
The Market, the American Dream, or Dreams of the Lottery
The Robert H. Atwell Plenary Address, ACE 2019
This paper was originally presented on March 10, 2019, as the Robert H. Atwell Plenary Address at ACE 2019 in Philadelphia. The income disparity in our country has been growing for 40 years, and this increasing inequality is putting pressure on the social cohesion of our nation. Commitment to our country’s institutions, including colleges and universities, and values, including equal opportunity and economic and social mobility, depends on everyone feeling that these institutions and values serve their welfare and their…
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Issue Brief
March 6, 2019
Restructuring Library Collaboration
Strategy, Membership, Governance
Academic libraries typically serve individual higher education institutions, yet their objectives require that they achieve greater negotiating power, more efficient distribution of collections, and stronger systems and services than even the largest academic library can provide itself. As a result, academic libraries have sought for more than a century to generate cross-institutional scale. In this paper, I examine efforts to generate that scale, including consortia and other membership organizations, which collectively I term “collaborative vehicles.” Yet collaboration is not good…
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Research Report
January 29, 2019
Library Acquisition Patterns
The Library Acquisition Patterns (LAP) project was undertaken with the support of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation with the aim of examining trends in US academic libraries’ book purchasing. The findings of this report consist of two distinct areas: 1) an analysis of library book acquisitions within the specified sample for fiscal year 2017 at 124 US academic institutions, and 2) a trend line analysis of print and e-books acquired within the specified sample, the university press presence in these…
Research Report
January 28, 2019
Art Museum Staff Demographic Survey 2018
In order to gauge the extent to which progress has been made since 2015 towards increasing staff diversity in art museums, in 2018 we undertook a second iteration of the demographic survey. At a high level, the study has found some meaningful progress in the representation of people of color in a number of different museum functions, including the curatorial. We also found an increase in the number of women in museum leadership positions from 2015 to 2018. Nevertheless, the…
Issue Brief
January 24, 2019
Doing More, With More
Academic Libraries, Digital Services, and Revenue Generation
The axiom to “do more with less” in university research libraries is increasingly untenable, as budgets continue to shrink and demand for novel services continues to rise. The impacts of such existential uncertainties are self-evident and widely discussed in the current literature—staff burnout, lowered morale and increased toxicity, weakened local collections, and limited capacity for ambitious and genuinely innovative work. Like many institutions, the University of Maryland (UMD) Libraries has found itself reinventing many of its services and initiatives to…
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Research Report
January 16, 2019
Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Civil and Environmental Engineering Scholars
Danielle Miriam Cooper, Rebecca Springer, Jessica G. Benner, David Bloom, Erin Carrillo, Alexander Carroll, Bertha Chang, Xiaoju Chen, Erin Daix, Emily Dommermuth, Rachel Figueiredo, Jennifer Haas, Carly A. Hafner, Whitney Hayes, Angela Henshilwood, Alexandra Lyn Craig Krogman, Rebecca Zuege Kuglitsch, Sabine Lanteri, Abbey Lewis, Lisha Li, Matthew R. Marsteller, Tom Melvin, Todd Michelson-Ambelang, William H. Mischo, Colin Nickels, Virginia Pannabecker, Fred Rascoe, Mary C. Schlembach, Yi Shen, Erin M. Smith, Michelle Spence, Kris Stacy-Bates, Erin Thomas, Larry Thompson, Mindy Thuna, Christie A. Wiley, Sarah Young, Siu Hong Yu
In 2017 and 2018 Ithaka S+R examined the changing research methods and practices of civil and environmental engineering scholars in the United States with the goal of identifying services to better support them. The goal of this report is to provide actionable findings for the organizations, institutions, and professionals who support the research processes of civil and environmental engineering scholars.
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Research Report
January 10, 2019
Enrolling More Veterans at High-Graduation-Rate Colleges and Universities
Higher education plays a vital role in raising income, moderating income inequality, and increasing economic growth and global competitiveness. But U.S. higher education attainment continues to lag for lower-income and underrepresented-minority students, particularly at the colleges and universities that have the most resources and the highest graduation rates. As a stark example, research by economist Raj Chetty and his team found that there are more students from the top one percent of the income distribution at the Ivy-Plus colleges than…
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Research Report
December 17, 2018
A 2018 Report on the Progress of the American Talent Initiative in its First Two Years
This report offers the first look at the progress achieved during the American Talent Initiative’s first two years. Between the 2015-16 academic year (the year before ATI’s founding) and the 2017-18 academic year, ATI members increased their enrollment of low- and moderate-income students by 7,291, an increase that represents about 15 percent of the 50,000-by-2025 goal, achieved by about a third of eligible schools. During this period, more than two-thirds of ATI members increased Pell enrollment, and for about half…
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Research Report
December 11, 2018
Mapping the Wild West of Pre-Hire Assessment
A Landscape View of the Uncharted Technology-Facilitated Ecosystem
The rise in technology-facilitated assessments has created a paradigm shift in employer talent acquisition. Traditionally, the process of assessing candidates’ skills has focused on resumes composed of credentials signifying successful participation in or completion of an experience (like a degree, a training program, or a prior job) and candidates’ own claims of competencies. Such a process favored intermediaries like higher education institutions, industry associations, governmental agencies, and former employers, who awarded credentials for successful program completion or could vouch for…
Issue Brief
November 28, 2018
Scholars ARE Collectors: A Proposal for Re-thinking Research Support
After fifteen years of digging into the research practices of scholars at Ithaka S+R, it is clear that scholars are collectors. We have found that they are creating and amassing increasingly complex personal collections of information over the course of their careers. These collections vary widely depending on the discipline and take many forms.
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Issue Brief
October 29, 2018
The State of Digital Preservation in 2018
A Snapshot of Challenges and Gaps
Our cultural, historic, and scientific heritage is increasingly being produced and shared in digital forms. The ubiquity, pervasiveness, variability, and fluidity of such content raise a range of questions about the role of research libraries and archives in digital preservation in the face of rapid organizational and technological changes and evolving organizational priorities. Ithaka S+R is interested in exploring the current landscape of digital preservation programs and services in order to identify research and policy questions that will contribute to…
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Research Report
September 26, 2018
The First-Year Experience in Two-Year Public Postsecondary Programs
Results of a National Survey
A student’s first year at a new college is a critically important period—academically, socio-emotionally, personally, and professionally. Whether transitioning from high school, other postsecondary education, or the labor market, students often need to adjust to a myriad of changes beyond just the new academic environment. They may be relocating, starting a new job in order to pay for tuition and living expenses, or facing new demands as they balance family responsibilities, work, and school deadlines. Students learn to navigate new…
Research Report
September 20, 2018
Interrogating Institutional Practices in Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion
Lessons and Recommendations from Case Studies in Eight Art Museums
In 2015, a demographic survey of the staff of North American art museums conducted by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), American Alliance of Museums (AAM), and Ithaka S+R found that the staff composition of museums in the United States is not remotely representative of the country’s population....In 2015, a demographic survey of the staff of North American art museums conducted by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Association of Art Museum Directors (AAMD), American Alliance of…
Case Study
September 20, 2018
Free for All: Contemporary Arts Museum Houston
Upon its founding in 1948, the Contemporary Arts Museum Houston (CAMH) was the first museum devoted to contemporary art in the region. Since its inception, this 16,000 square foot gallery, located between the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston (MFAH) and Rice University, has responded to its rich environmental context. Houston has long been known for its remarkably diverse population, as well as its contributions to civil liberties, from Smith vs. Allwright in 1944, which ended the common practice of “white…
Case Study
September 20, 2018
Becoming a Public Square: Detroit Institute of Arts
Detroit Institute of Arts Facade, Courtesy of the Detroit Institute of Arts Located in midtown Detroit’s cultural center, the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) is one of the largest encyclopedic museums in the country, housing nearly 66,000 works of art. From the outside, described by many of its staff as looking like a castle on a hill, one would not guess at the museum’s turbulent history, stemming from a complex relationship with the city of Detroit. Today,…
Research Report
September 19, 2018
CIC Consortium for Online Humanities Instruction II
Evaluation Report for the Second Course Iteration
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…
Research Report
August 13, 2018
Amplifying Student Voices
The Community College Libraries and Academic Support for Student Success Project
The Community College Libraries & Academic Support for Student Success (CCLASSS) project examines student goals, challenges, and needs from the student perspective. Through this project, we aim to provide community colleges and their libraries with strategic intelligence on how to adapt their services to most effectively meet student needs. In spring 2018, we conducted semi-structured interviews with students at seven partner community colleges on student objectives and goals, definitions of success, challenges faced, and coursework practices. Key findings Across…