Topic: Libraries
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…
Blog Post
October 1, 2019
Sustaining the Open Sector: A Brief Look Back
During the last two decades, we’ve seen the emergence of several open source (OS) and open access (OA) initiatives designed to support the academic and cultural community’s needs for more effective, versatile, and cost-efficient tools. Since 2006, Ithaka S+R has explored the sustainability requirements of these resources, investigating both the factors that lead to success and the reasons behind setbacks and failures. Today, amid the failure of several cross-institutional “open” initiatives and the broader search for funding to…
Blog Post
September 30, 2019
Students Are the Experts
New Report Explores the Needs of Community College Students
How do community college students define their own success? And what services do they think will help them succeed? To find out, we started with a radical idea: students are the experts. Last year, we interviewed dozens of students at seven community colleges on their goals and unmet needs. Today, we release a new report, Student Needs Are Academic Needs, on a…
Research Report
September 30, 2019
Student Needs Are Academic Needs
Community College Libraries and Academic Support for Student Success
The Community College Libraries and Academic Support for Student Success (CCLASSS) project examines student success from the perspective of students themselves, what challenges they face in achieving it, and what services can be developed to effectively support them in their attainment of that success. In fall 2018, we surveyed 10,844 students across seven community colleges to assess the value of and demand for proposed services designed to address students’ expressed goals, challenges, and needs.
Blog Post
September 23, 2019
Concerned About Bots Taking Over Your Survey?
Reflections on Maintaining Data Integrity
Last week, a researcher from the University of Minnesota, Melissa Simone, shared an honest and frightening account of having bots infiltrate data gathered via an online research study. Within 12 hours of launching a survey, Simone found over 350 responses within the resulting dataset from bots. The process of identifying, screening for, and cleaning these data took hundreds of hours, she reported via Twitter. https://twitter.com/m_simonephd/status/1174010078632009728?s=20 Simone goes on to share a number of recommendations to prevent…
Blog Post
September 19, 2019
Emergent Data Community Spotlight III
An Interview with Kitty Emery and Rob Guralnick on ZooArchNet
Successful data sharing crosses disciplinary silos. As Danielle Cooper and I argued in a recent issue brief, “data communities” — formal or informal groups of scholars who share a certain type of data with each other — emerge both within and across disciplinary boundaries. In order to understand how these data communities emerge — and to understand how they can best be supported — I’ve been seeking out leaders who are at the…
Blog Post
September 16, 2019
Building Data Skills across the Globe
A Virtual Roundtable with Library Carpentry
As scholars across disciplines increasingly turn to data-intensive research methods, academic libraries are considering how to adapt to meet the growing demand for research data instructional and advisory services. In a recent blog post, I observed that among R1 institutions in the United States overall staffing levels for research-data-dedicated library roles remain low, with over half of R1s sporting zero or one data librarian in their university libraries. But hiring dedicated data librarians…