Topic: Libraries
Blog Post
December 12, 2019
Teaching Business: New Report Explores the Needs of Business Faculty
Today Ithaka S+R is releasing the first report in a new program focused on supporting teaching practices. In it, we explore the needs of faculty teaching undergraduate business. We started with business as it is consistently one of the most popular majors in the United States, and understanding the needs of faculty in this field can have a large impact on undergraduate teaching and learning. Informed by interviews with 158 business…
Research Report
December 12, 2019
Teaching Business
Looking at the Support Needs of Instructors
Business represents the most popular undergraduate major at American colleges and universities and was seen as the ideal discipline to begin with, especially as the potential number of students to be positively impacted is correspondingly large. The goal of this report, therefore, is to provide actionable findings for organizations, institutions, and professionals who support the teaching practices of business educators. This report describes the teaching practices of business instructors, both those that are common to all college level instruction as…
Blog Post
December 10, 2019
Perspectives on the 2018 US Faculty Survey in Against the Grain
Every three years when we release findings from our national faculty surveys, we receive a plethora of reactions and responses to the results. There was no exception when we released the 2018 results in conjunction with the ACRL conference in April 2019. While these high-level quantitative results offer strong evidence toward understanding faculty practices and perspectives, particularly for tracking change over time, many who work in academic libraries, learned societies, and…
Blog Post
December 5, 2019
What Are the Larger Implications of Ex Libris Buying Innovative?
Earlier today, news began leaking out that Ex Libris will purchase Innovative Interfaces, one of its largest competitors. The deal, which is expected to close in early 2020, further cements Ex Libris as the leader in the library systems marketplace and can be expected to put added pressure on OCLC. It will also raise concerns about Ex Libris’s dominant market position. Library Systems Ex Libris’s core business is in library systems,…
Blog Post
December 5, 2019
Making the CCASSE for Support Services
When we interviewed dozens of community college students about their challenges and unmet needs, many reported struggling with navigating college resources. When we subsequently heard from over 10,000 students via survey about the services they need to achieve their vision of success, the overwhelming majority responded positively to a service centered around helping students navigate these resources. Last year, we embarked on the…
Research Report
December 5, 2019
Organizing Support for Success
Community College Academic and Student Support Ecosystems
The Community College Academic and Student Support Ecosystems (CCASSE) project examines how academic and student support services at not-for-profit associate-degree granting colleges are organized, funded, and staffed, and how these services can most effectively advance student success. In spring 2019, we surveyed 249 chief academic and student affairs officers at community colleges across the United States on success measures, services offered, resource challenges and constraints, and vision for future service provision.
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.