tag: US Library Survey

As research and teaching practices evolve in the context of substantial environmental change within higher education, the ways in which scholars discover resources for these practices have shifted. In addition to providing traditional print resources, libraries have more recently supported these changes with a variety of digital tools including the library website, catalog, and discovery services, and meanwhile, outside of the library, mainstream search engines and targeted academic discovery products offer their own systems to enable discovery. Faculty members in…

Yesterday, Teresa Watanabe at the Los Angeles Times reported on universities across the country redesigning libraries for the 21st century by focusing less on books and more on space. Findings from the Ithaka S+R Library Survey 2016, which queried library deans and directors across the United States on their strategy and priorities, demonstrate the ways that these libraries are evolving, and confirm much of the anecdotal evidence provided by the LA Times.[1] Throughout our national survey…

While academic libraries in the United States have actively collaborated with each other for more than 100 years, the digital turn has brought an explosion of interest in and pursuit of cross-institutional collaboration. These include large-scale digital access and preservation initiatives like HathiTrust, print preservation and access collaborations like Scholar’s Trust and WEST, metropolitan-level efforts ranging broadly from the Chicago Collections Alliance to MARLI, unmediated borrowing such as ConnectNY, and, of burgeoning strategic importance, the collaborations enabled through cloud-based library…

Last week, Ithaka S+R published results from the US Library Survey 2016. This report examines the perspectives of library deans and directors on strategy and priorities broadly. This cycle, we expanded our coverage of issues related to talent management, building on recent Ithaka S+R projects on organizational structure and inclusion, diversity, and equity. Employees are often the greatest asset of an organization, and therefore, a mindset to recruit, develop, and retain an outstanding pool of employees…

Today, Ithaka S+R is releasing the US Library Survey 2016, which tracks the perspectives and practices of academic libraries whose institutions offer a bachelor’s degree or higher. We achieved strong participation by library deans and directors, with a response rate of 49%. The project examines the key strategic directions these leaders and their libraries are pursuing as well as some of the constraints against which they act. Our findings fall into a number of key categories: Library directors anticipate…

Last week, my new issue brief on discovery came out. Since its release, there has been some very interesting discussion on the topic. I’ve tried to bring together some of the commentary from Twitter and blogs here and to suggest some future directions these imply for our community. A point of departure for the paper is an analysis of library directors’ responses to the strongly worded statement “It is strategically important that my library be seen by its users…

Today, NISO is releasing the recommended practice for its Open Discovery Initiative. This important initiative is intended to bring greater order to the indexed discovery services that have achieved a market penetration of roughly three-quarters of US academic libraries, according to the most recent Ithaka S+R US Library Survey 2013 (pages 53-54). With such a high share of libraries positioning indexed discovery services as the primary discovery interface for their users, it is essential to address the concerns—both…

Helping users find content is one of the fundamental services that academic libraries have historically provided. As we have tracked in the Ithaka S+R survey of library deans and directors, it is also an area where there have been important and fast-moving changes. In the 2010 survey, library directors saw discovery as an area for increased investment, and many libraries subsequently put money into new-to-the-market index-based discovery services that promised to bring their collections together into a single search…

The March 11 publication of the Ithaka S+R US Library Survey 2013 has garnered some immediate media coverage: Ian Chant, “Ithaka Study Shows Shifting Priorities Among Academic Librarians,” Library Journal. Jennifer Howard, “What Matters to Academic-Library Directors? Information Literacy,” The Chronicle of Higher Education. Carl Straumsheim, “Beyond eBooks,” Inside Higher Ed. Michael Todd, “State of the Stacks: Academic Libraries in a Digital Age,” Social Science Space.

Ithaka S+R’s ongoing survey research projects form a cornerstone of our efforts to understand how academic behaviors and practices are changing, and how service providers adapt. These surveys include the triennial Ithaka S+R Faculty Survey – last run in 2009 and now in planning for fall 2012 – as well as our Library Survey, which was most recently fielded in 2010 and focuses on the strategies that library administrators are pursuing for their libraries. In addition to coverage in…