Topic: Collections and preservation

Every now and again it is useful to take a look at past programs and reflect on what we learned. I had the great pleasure of working on such a project over the last several months. The American Architectural Foundation asked us to assist with an evaluation of the Save America’s Treasures project that was funded by the federal government from 1999-2010 through the National Park Service and its partner agencies, the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment…

Several years ago, Ithaka S+R began developing a new methodology to gather data about library acquisition patterns. Today, we are excited to announce that we have received support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation to expand this into a large-scale, national study. The project, as it was originally conceived by Joseph Esposito, hoped to gain a better understanding of how distribution channels were changing. Our interest was piqued by the knowledge that libraries were often purchasing…

We are today in the midst of a profound reconfiguration of all sorts of information industries, impacting everything from journalism to entertainment. Libraries and scholarly information providers are not alone. Last week’s news of the bepress acquisition by Elsevier, which I first covered in a business analysis suggesting its strong strategic fit along with some potential risks, took the academic library community by storm. As the dust begins to settle, this is a…

Today Ithaka S+R releases its in-depth report on the research activities of agriculture scholars as part of its ongoing program to explore the research activities of scholars by discipline. For Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Agriculture Scholars, we explore the breadth of agriculture research activities in U.S. higher education towards fostering information services that will support those endeavors. As the report highlights, agriculture is a particularly compelling field because of its broad scope and wider societal relevance,…

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…

OCLC Research and Ithaka S+R have studied and written extensively about the evolution of higher education and the implications of this evolution for the organizational structure and services of libraries. Today, we are announcing a new project, “University Futures; Library Futures”, in which OCLC Research and Ithaka S+R are joining forces to carry out a collaborative project on the future of academic libraries, in the context of changes in the higher…

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…

Today, we are publishing a report that grew out of a new type of collaboration facilitated by Ithaka S+R. As we continue to study the research practices of faculty in particular disciplines, we have developed a model that harnesses the knowledge and expertise of librarians on the ground. For Supporting the Changing Research Practices of Religious Studies Scholars, sponsored by the American Theological Library Association (ATLA) with additional support from the American Academy of Religion (AAR) and the Society…

The Modern Language Association’s Working Group on the Future of the Print Record released its report last month and I urge the library community to consider it carefully and respond. As a member of the working group, I have been impressed with the collaboration of scholars and librarians in dealing with an issue that is both important and complex. Librarians have witnessed a dramatic change in students’ and researchers’ use of print materials housed in their collections. The convenience…

Open Access Week is a particularly appropriate time to reflect on the many different ways to expand access. Appropriately, new publishing and distribution models for the scholarly and scientific literature will be the subject of much discussion. Existing library collections of journals, books, newspapers, and government documents also contain substantial amounts of public domain material, and as Melissa Levine reminds us in her issue brief we are releasing today, “The public domain is the ultimate open access.”…

Since 2014, eleven of the twenty-nine Canadian Association of Research Libraries (CARL) member institutions have participated in running the Ithaka S+R Local Faculty Survey on their campuses, providing a rich dataset of over 4,000 responses across the universities. This morning, we published findings on the research and teaching practices of these faculty members. We have been examining the attitudes and behaviors of academics in the US and the UK every three years since 2000 and 2012 respectively,…

Fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion is an issue of ever-growing importance in libraries and archives but to what extent can these principles be universally applied? At Ithaka S+R we recently fielded a study on representation in the New York cultural sector and are now working on a study on representation within the academic library community. I have also experienced the palpable interest in these issues in the library and archives sphere first hand through two conferences I recently…