Topic: Libraries
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. My online #researchstudy was recently infiltrated by…
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…
Blog Post
September 12, 2019
How Can Academic Libraries and University Museums Effectively Collaborate?
Ithaka S+R is conducting a study on the relationship between academic libraries and campus museums, looking specifically at how they are governed and structured. With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, we are in the process of inviting forty universities to participate, and over the Fall will interview the directors of both their museum and library in order to learn more about how these campus units operate in relation to the university and to one another. …
Blog Post
September 10, 2019
Emergent Data Community Spotlight II
An Interview with Felicity Tayler and Marjorie Mitchell on the SpokenWeb Project
For all today’s technological affordances, research data sharing remains a fundamentally social activity, dependent on building “data communities” from the ground up. Danielle Cooper and I argued as much in a recent issue brief, and since then, I’ve been seeking out pioneers who are at the forefront of efforts to grow emergent data communities in a variety of research areas. What does it take to get a successful data sharing movement off the…
Past Event
November 6, 2019
Library Collections: Creatively Adjusting Budgets to Invest in Open Content
Roger Schonfeld at the Charleston Conference
On Wednesday, November 6, from 2:00 – 3:10 pm , Roger Schonfeld will join Barbara Dewey (Penn State University), Julia Gelfand (University of California, Irvine), and Dan Cohen (Northeastern University) for a panel discussion, “Library Collections: Creatively Adjusting Budgets to Invest in Open Content,” at the Charleston Conference. For more information and to register, please see the conference website. About the panel Building on the 2019 ACRL/SPARC Forum on Collective Reinvestment in Open Infrastructure, this program will explore how…
Past Event
November 7, 2019
The Future of Subscription Bundles: Big Deal, No Deal, or What’s the Deal?
Roger Schonfeld at the Charleston Conference
On Thursday, November 7, from 4:30 – 5:15 pm, Roger Schonfeld will present on “The Future of Subscription Bundles: Big Deal, No Deal, or What’s the Deal?” as part of a Charleston Conference panel. Beth Bernhardt (Oxford University Press), Tim Bucknall (the University of North Carolina at Greensboro), and Mark McBride (SUNY System Administration) are also presenting. For more information and to register, please see the conference website. About the panel In light of well-publicized negotiations around journal deals…
Blog Post
September 3, 2019
Ithaka S+R Student Surveys: 2020 Edition
Ithaka S+R is gearing up to update our local student surveys and we are now accepting expressions of interest from libraries to field the surveys in the spring 2020 semester. Our student surveys, which have been fielded at dozens of institutions since 2014, were developed to complement our local faculty survey. They cover the perspectives of undergraduate and graduate students on their objectives for pursuing higher education, their coursework activities, and their use…
Blog Post
August 27, 2019
Powerful Partner Questions
Survey Design Strategies from the Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey
When responding to a survey, do you ever have a sense of déjà vu, as though you already answered a very similar question a minute before? There might be a very good reason for the repetition. Across seven cycles of the US Faculty Survey and in our implementation of this instrument with more than 100 institutions across the globe, we have often found great value in approaching the…
Blog Post
August 15, 2019
US Faculty Survey 2018 Reveals Uncertainty about Fraudulent Research Practices
A report published earlier this year from The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine disclosed findings from their recent assessment of reproducibility and replicability across different fields of research. Congress requested this collaborative study because of prolific media exposure on data misconduct and the inability of scientists to replicate important research. Additionally, there has been extensive media coverage of researchers who fabricate…
Blog Post
August 6, 2019
Inside an Ithaka S+R Training Workshop
In 2016, Ithaka S+R began collaborating with libraries to extend our deep dives into the research needs of faculty in a variety of fields, including, Civil & Environmental Engineering, Asian Studies, Religious Studies, Public Health, and Indigenous Studies. Having partnered with 75 university libraries for these studies, last year, we began using a…
Blog Post
July 30, 2019
Advancing Diversity and Inclusion through the Rare Book School
I’m thrilled to share that Ithaka S+R will be serving as an evaluator on the The Andrew W. Mellon Fellowship for Diversity, Inclusion & Cultural Heritage, a six-year program which aims to advance multicultural collections through innovative and inclusive curatorial practice and leadership at the Rare Book School. Through this fellowship, 45 fellows who identify with diverse racial or ethnic communities and/or who work primarily with collections that document minority, immigrant,…
Blog Post
July 29, 2019
Announcing Two New S+R Projects on Supporting Data Work
Evolving data practices are re-shaping the academic landscape. Here at Ithaka S+R we’ve been tracking how scholars’ data support needs are evolving more widely through our triennial U.S. faculty survey and through deep dives into specific disciplinary practices, such as our recent report on Civil and Environmental Engineering. We’ve also uncovered how scholars’ work in data communities challenges the traditional disciplinary and institutional siloing…
Blog Post
July 29, 2019
Counting Data Librarians
How many data librarians does the average research university have? As data science methodologies are embraced by more and more academic fields–and as funders and administrators increasingly prioritize big data projects–academic libraries are staffing up to meet a growing demand. “Research data services” is a term that encompasses a broad range of support functions that help students and scholars conduct research with data. Some of these include: Directing users to…
Past Event
September 28, 2019
Untapped Resources: Addressing Stigma & Scarcity
Christine Wolff-Eisenberg at #RealCollege
On Saturday, September 28, from 1:30-2:15, Christine Wolff-Eisenberg is speaking on “Untapped Resources: Addressing Stigma & Scarcity” at the #Real College Convening at the Houston Community College West Houston Institute. For more information and to register, please visit the #Real College website. …
Past Event
November 6, 2019
Community College Success: Student Perspectives & Institutional Practices
Rayane Alamuddin and Christine Wolff-Eisenberg Present at College Board Forum
On Wednesday, November 6, from 4:00-5:15 pm, Rayane Alamuddin and Christine Wolff-Eisenberg will present on “Community College Success: Student Perspectives & Institutional Practices” at the College Board Forum in Washington, DC. They will be joined on the panel by Dr. Braddlee, Dean of Learning & Technology Resources at Northern Virginia Community College, Annandale Campus, and Elizabeth Gonzalez, Director of the METAS Center and Hispanic Serving Institution Initiatives, at San Jose City College. For more information about the Forum and to…
Blog Post
July 22, 2019
Emergent Data Community Spotlight
An Interview with Dr. Vance Lemmon on Spinal Cord Injury Research
Encouraging scholars to share research data with one another promises to increase research efficiency, reproducibility, and innovation. In a recent issue brief, Danielle Cooper and I argued for a new conceptual framework for understanding and supporting research data sharing: data communities. Data communities are formal or informal groups of scholars who share a certain type of data with each other, regardless of disciplinary…