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Topic: Libraries

Past Event
December 9, 2019

Data Sharing from the Ground Up

Danielle Cooper and Rebecca Springer at CNI

On Monday, December 9, 2019, at 2:30 pm, Danielle Cooper and Rebecca Springer will present on “Data Sharing from the Ground Up: Building Data Communities” at the CNI Fall Meeting in Washington DC. For more information and to register for the conference, please see the CNI website. Abstract There is a growing consensus that research can progress more quickly, more innovatively, and more rigorously when scholars share data with each other. Policies and supports for data sharing…
Past Event
November 16, 2019

Danielle Cooper and Kurtis Tanaka at the National Conference on Higher Education in Prison

On Saturday, November 16, ITHAKA is hosting a breakfast session  to share an update on “Providing Offline Access to High-Quality Library Resources in Prisons”at the 2019 National Conference on Higher Education in Prison in St. Louis, Missouri. With support from The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, in 2019 ITHAKA launched an initiative to help improve higher education in prison and reduce barriers for student research. In this session, Danielle Cooper and Kurtis Tanaka will provide an update on the project’s research…
Blog Post
November 12, 2019

Taking the Temperature on Open Access Among UC Berkeley Faculty

In fall 2018, UC Berkeley fielded the Ithaka S+R local faculty survey, concurrent with our national initiative. In this post, Chan Li, Assessment Program Librarian, shares how data from this survey can be used for decision-making in supporting scholarly communication efforts of faculty members. — Christine Wolff-Eisenberg To promote a publishing ecosystem where the impact of research can be maximized by removing readership barriers, the UC Berkeley Library is making many efforts to push for open access publishing,…
Past Event
November 19, 2019

The Future of Content Distribution: Licensing or Leakage

Roger Schonfeld Moderates SSP Webinar

On Tuesday, November 19, at 11:00 am, Roger Schonfeld is moderating an SSP webinar, “The Future of Content Distribution: Licensing or Leakage.” Speakers for the webinar include Jonathan Austin, Director of Product Management at Springer Nature, Todd Toler, Vice President of Product Strategy & Partnerships at John Wiley & Sons, and Elaine Westbrooks, Vice Provost for University Libraries & University Librarian at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. For more information about the webinar and to register, please…
Past Event
November 14, 2019

The Unfunded Mandate of Compliance

Oya Y. Rieger at NFAIS Foresight Event

On Thursday, November 14, Oya Y. Rieger is speaking on “The Unfunded Mandate of Compliance” at the NFAIS Foresight Event, “Open Access: The Role and Impact of Preprint Servers,” in Washington DC. Her talk will take place at 2:00 pm. For more information and to register, please see the event website. Abstract During the last decade, we’ve witnessed the emergence of public access policies by a range of governmental and private funding agencies to open up scholarly outputs that…
Blog Post
November 6, 2019

A Methodology for Testing Service Concepts

New Issue Brief

As academic libraries continue to evolve beyond a focus on collections, their leaders have long recognized the importance of developing new services that add value for learners, instructors, researchers, and other stakeholders. Sometimes, the demand for new services is self-evident, but in other cases the library must develop services speculatively and in a competitive environment. In these cases, planning and assessment tools can be of tremendous value in allowing library leaders to focus their new service initiatives most…
Issue Brief
November 6, 2019

What Do Our Users Need?

An Evidence-Based Approach for Designing New Services

In the face of evolving user needs, many academic libraries are reimagining the services they offer. As instruction moves online, how can libraries best provide support for teaching and learning? As research becomes more reliant on data, computation, and collaboration, where can libraries best add value? As colleges welcome more diverse student populations and greater contingent faculty labor to campus, what is the library’s role? As budgets shrink, how should a library prioritize which resources and services to provide?…
Blog Post
October 31, 2019

Three Questions for Mark McBride

SUNY central system administration and its 64 campus libraries have been working with Ithaka S+R to develop strategies for collaboration and partnership in the context of substantial strategic and technological change. For our most recent newsletter, we spoke with Mark McBride, senior strategist in SUNY’s Office of Library and Information Services, about how this is unfolding across the system and why he thinks it is so important. What did you learn from Ithaka S+R’s analysis of publishing across SUNY’s…
Blog Post
October 24, 2019

How to Survey Community College Students

New Report Now Available

Last month, we published a report based on the findings of a survey of over 10,000 students at seven community colleges. While the project itself is aimed at better understanding the needs, goals, and challenges of students, and assessing demand for a number of services that might support their success, a helpful byproduct of this research is what we have uncovered in administering a survey to this population. Today we are publishing…
Research Report
October 24, 2019

Surveying Community College Students

Strategies for Maximizing Engagement and Increasing Participation

Higher education researchers need to employ effective outreach methods in order to connect with the populations they study. For surveys in particular, low response rates can lead to non-response error, decreasing generalizability and representativeness. To combat these issues, Ithaka S+R has developed and tested a suite of outreach strategies that we have employed over the past two decades in our long-running national faculty survey as well as our local surveys of faculty and students.[1] In fall 2018, we surveyed students…
Blog Post
October 21, 2019

Getting My CLAWs into Assessment

The biennial Canadian Library Assessment Workshop (CLAW) is set to take place this week at the University of Windsor. This will be my first time attending the workshop, which primarily focuses on outcome-based initiatives and decision making to better support libraries and demonstrate their impact on research, teaching, and learning. As I eagerly await for the  workshop to kick off, I’m sharing some emergent themes and takeaways from the conference…
Past Event
October 22, 2019

Network Ecosystems – Story-Telling & Sharing among Partners

Roger Schonfeld at SUNY's Strategic Partnerships in Higher Education Conference

On Tuesday, October 22, Roger Schonfeld will present on “Network Ecosystems – Story-Telling & Sharing among Partners” as part of a panel at SUNY’s Strategic Partnerships in Higher Education Conference in Albany, New York. He will be joined by Mark McBride (Library Senior Strategist, SUNY System), Norman Bier (Director of the Open Learning Initiative, Carnegie Mellon & Executive Director, Simon Initiative), Donna Desrochers (Associate, rpk Group), Kim Thanos (Chief Executive Officer, Lumen Learning), and David Yaskin (Chief Executive Officer, Faculty…
Blog Post
October 21, 2019

Beyond Innovation: Emerging Meta-Frameworks for Maintaining an Open Scholarly Infrastructure

There are numerous free and community-based academic and cultural resources that are designed and built on open source or open access principles. Undertaken by not-for-profit mission-driven organizations, such services and technologies aim to introduce innovation to various stages of scholarly communication from designing research projects to publishing results.  Today, amid growing concerns about their long-term durability and agility, there is renewed interest in sustainability, business models, revenue, and maintenance. In our previous post, we looked back at some…
Blog Post
October 16, 2019

Why we are adding a basic needs module to the Ithaka S+R local surveys

Students often struggle with balancing their personal, professional, and academic responsibilities, including affording their most basic needs in conjunction with course expenses. Recognizing this reality, we will be offering a basic needs module for the Ithaka S+R local student surveys starting in spring 2020. In late 2018, colleagues and I worked in partnership with a cohort of community colleges to survey their students about their goals and challenges.
Past Event
October 13, 2019

The Labor of Open

Danielle Cooper at the Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute

From Sunday, October 13 through Wednesday, October 17, Danielle Cooper is participating in the 2019 Triangle Scholarly Communication Institute in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. The theme of this year’s institute is “Equity in Scholarly Communications.” Danielle will be working on a team with Leslie Chan (University of Toronto Scarborough), Emily Drabinski (CUNY Grad Center), Lisa Janicke Hinchliffe (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign), Jojo Karlin (CUNY Grad Center), and Ela Przybylo (Illinois State University) on “The Labor of Open.” The Triangle…
Past Event
November 8, 2019

The Impact of Market Consolidation on Libraries and Universities

Roger Schonfeld at the Charleston Conference

On Friday, November 8, from 9:45 – 10:30 am, Roger Schonfeld is taking part in a panel discussion, “Good, Bad or Somewhere In-Between: The Impact of Market Consolidation on Libraries and Universities,” at the Charleston Conference. He will be speaking with Meg White (Rittenhouse Book Distributors), Kara Kroes Li (EBSCO Information Services), and Doug Way (University of Kentucky Libraries). For more information and to register, please see the conference website. About the panel Mergers and acquisitions are a normal…
Past Event
November 7, 2019

Preprints – Why Should Librarians Care?

Oya Rieger at the Charleston Conference

On, Thursday, November 7, from 2:30 – 3:10 pm, Oya Y. Rieger will join Susan K. Kendall (Michigan State University Libraries), Rachel Burley (Springer Nature), and Jessica Polka (ASAPbio) for a panel discussion on “Preprints – Why Should Librarians Care?” at the Charleston Conference. For more information and to register, please see the conference website. About the panel Librarians play a critical role in supporting students and faculty in understanding the trends and developments in scholarly communications. Librarians also…
Past Event
November 6, 2019

Legacy Missions in Times of Change: Defining and Shaping Collections in the 21st Century

Oya Rieger at the Charleston Conference

On Wednesday, November 6, from 2:00 – 3:00 pm, Oya Y. Rieger will speak on “Legacy Missions in Times of Change: Defining and Shaping Collections in the 21st Century” at the Charleston Conference. She will be joined by the University of Kentucky Libraries’ Antje Mays. For more information and to register, please see the conference website. About the session Despite the rapidly changing information and technology landscape, collections continue to be at the heart of academic libraries, signifying their…
Past Event
October 16, 2019

Roger Schonfeld at the SSP Micro-Conference

Frankfurter Buchmesse 2019

On Wednesday, October 16, Roger Schonfeld is joining other “chefs” from The Scholarly Kitchen at the SSP Micro-Conference and Business Meeting at the Frankfurter Buchmesse 2019 to discuss “What’s Hot and Cooking in Scholarly and Academic Publishing.” To learn more, please see the SSP website. About the session Founded in 2008, The Scholarly Kitchen is read by thousands of publishers, editors, librarians, researchers, and publishing service providers in more than 200 countries each day. In lightning-round format, TSK Chefs will explore what’s in scholarly…
Blog Post
October 10, 2019

Update on Ithaka S+R Student Surveys: 2020 Edition

The process for updating Ithaka S+R’s local student surveys is underway. In August, we brought together a fantastic group of advisors and gathered their feedback on current student practices, perspectives, and needs. We then set out to incorporate their feedback into the instruments this past September by adding new thematic areas of focus, expanding on areas of particular importance, and phasing out questions that have become less relevant…