Topic: Libraries
Blog Post
August 10, 2015
The Organizational Structure of Academic Libraries
Ithaka S+R is launching a new research project to examine how organizational structure affects the academic library’s capacity for effective decision-making on major strategic issues. My interest in this topic draws from Ithaka S+R’s experiences helping more than 75 academic libraries survey their own faculty members and students as well as our other library consultations. Through these projects, it is clear that some libraries are better positioned to act on the research they conduct and the evidence they gather…
Blog Post
August 3, 2015
Notes from the Northumbria Conference
Alisa Rod and I had the pleasure of attending the 11th Northumbria International Conference on Performance Measurement in Libraries and Information Services, a biennial meeting held this year in Edinburgh, Scotland. Many people think of the Northumbria Conference as the British complement to the ARL Library Assessment Conference held in the US. The conference venue, Our Dynamic Earth, put us in the middle of excited children exploring oceans and rainforests on the one side and a spectacular view…
Blog Post
July 15, 2015
What Does the Future of Higher Education Look Like? It Depends Where You Sit
As part of a panel organized for the recent annual conference of the American Library Association in San Francisco, I was invited to talk about future trends in higher education. This was something of a fool’s errand, I realize, since we are bombarded every day by the media with higher education’s most pressing challenges and opportunities: Low completion rates New pedagogies that meet more of today’s students’ needs—online learning, competency-based education, etc. Need for a higher education ecosystem…
Blog Post
July 13, 2015
Designing and Governing Library Collaborations
I was recently recalling a fantastic study by Ralph Wagner on The History of the Farmington Plan. It reviewed some of the most important efforts at collaboration among the US research libraries, especially in the post-war period, and analyzed their successes and eventual demise. I thought of this book as I was wondering if anyone has done a serious examination of collaboration in research university libraries. Cultures of collaboration, and their reflection in organizational design and governance, were on…
Blog Post
July 10, 2015
Resources for Reinvestment in Academic Libraries
At ALA Annual in San Francisco last month, one of the interesting panels that I attended featured the executive leadership of six library technology companies. The moderator, Marshall Breeding, started things off with a question about how each company’s business model helped it serve library needs. OCLC’s Skip Prichard spoke about his organization’s governance as a partnership of libraries, while ProQuest’s Kurt Sanford emphasized that because it is family-owned his organization can take a long-term perspective. I…
Blog Post
July 8, 2015
Taking Stock: Sharing Responsibility for Print Preservation
How do we ensure the long-term preservation of our print heritage even as our collections move more fully online? In “Taking Stock: Sharing Responsibility for Print Preservation,” Roger Schonfeld surveys the progress our community has made in the past decade, but warns against the conflation of collaborative print management and improved access to collections with preservation. While “we may have developed a strong network for managing down print, Schonfeld argues, “whether that will yield long-term preservation goals is quite…
Issue Brief
July 8, 2015
Taking Stock: Sharing Responsibility for Print Preservation
Thank you Bernie for inviting me to close the second Preserving America’s Print Resources summit meeting by taking stock of our progress in North America.[1] Even as I will raise questions about roles and responsibilities during the course of my talk, I am reminded that many in this room have been working on this issue for many years. Let’s recognize the print preservation leaders, so many of you here today, who are heroes of our generation’s efforts to…
Blog Post
May 7, 2015
Educating the Research Librarian
Are We Falling Short?
Arguing that the enormous changes occurring in research libraries are not matched by the pace of change in library program curricula, Deanna Marcum explores the gap between teaching and practice in our latest issue brief. We hope that this brief will stimulate others to think about what we should expect from our MLIS programs. Please use our blog as a forum to share your ideas for reform and change. Interested? Download “Educating the Research Librarian: Are…
Issue Brief
May 7, 2015
Educating the Research Librarian
Are We Falling Short?
For the entirety of my professional career, it has been a hobby of most practitioners to fret about library education. Practitioners have complained that the schools of library and information science were not preparing professionals as well as they might for particular segments of the profession—school libraries, public libraries, academic libraries, etc. The professional schools have responded that their job is to prepare students to work in all kinds of information organizations, not just libraries, and that these skills are…
Blog Post
May 4, 2015
Defining Institutional Boundaries
Academic library systems, such as ILS, proxy, and content management system like LibGuides, are typically selected, managed, and organized on an institutional basis. Even when systems are increasingly cloud-based or hosted elsewhere, there is an institutional logic inherent in them. There are often good reasons for this logic, but I would like to use the example of discovery to raise questions about where this approach is effective and where it poses limitations. Thinking about the researcher’s discovery starting point,…
Blog Post
April 17, 2015
The Vital Need to Link Discovery and Access
Over the past few weeks, there has been an interesting set of discussions about whether the Liberian part of the Ebola outbreak this winter was foretold and therefore could have been stopped earlier. Writing an op-ed in the New York Times, several researchers noted that they recently “stumbled across” an article indicating the reasonable likelihood that Liberia would be faced with cases of Ebola, which turned out to have been one of several studies predicting Liberia being in the…
Blog Post
March 26, 2015
Meeting Researchers Where They Start
Streamlining Access to Scholarly Resources
Researchers today have access to incredible amounts of digital content as well as to a suite of tools to aid in their discovery of these academic resources. Yet, as Roger Schonfeld describes in our most recent issue brief, “the researcher’s discovery-to-access workflow is much more difficult than it should be.” “Instead of the rich and seamless digital library for scholarship that they need,” Schonfeld argues, “researchers today encounter archipelagos of content bridged by infrastructure that is insufficient and often…
Issue Brief
March 26, 2015
Meeting Researchers Where They Start
Streamlining Access to Scholarly Resources
Instead of the rich and seamless digital library for scholarship that they need, researchers today encounter archipelagos of content bridged by infrastructure that is insufficient and often outdated. These interconnections could afford opportunities to improve discovery and access. But in point of fact, the researcher’s discovery-to-access workflow is much more difficult than it should be.[1] …researchers’ expectations are being set not by improvements relative to the past but rather by reference to consumer internet services A different paper…
Blog Post
March 16, 2015
The Role of a Society Journal in a Changing Environment
The 75th Anniversary Issue of College & Research Libraries has just been released online. C&RL’s editor, Scott Walter, has lovingly featured a selection of classic and impactful articles from the journal’s history, revisited by some of today’s leading experts on academic librarianship. I was asked to take on a slightly different task, to reflect in a closing piece about the role of a professional society’s journal in a changing environment for our scholarly communications. C&RL is already open access…
Blog Post
March 5, 2015
Serving Graduate Students
Graduate and professional students are among the heaviest users of academic libraries, driven by original research and various types of extensive literature reviews. Faculty members have traditionally had their interests represented through various types of library advisory committees, and in recent years libraries have turned significant attention to undergraduate student success. In many universities, of the library’s major stakeholder groups, graduate students are least well understood and, in these cases, they may offer potentially the greatest opportunity for improvements to…
Blog Post
March 2, 2015
A User-Centric Approach to Privacy for the Academic Library
The shift of library services to online interfaces has led to an explosion in the potential for data gathering, and also to a growing conversation about how the data should and could be used. This past year has witnessed a strong dialogue about libraries’ responsibility for maintaining the privacy and security of the data. Leading experts have pointed out the astonishing number of ways that privacy and security are unintentionally compromised in libraries’ everyday service environment. Protecting the privacy…
Blog Post
February 27, 2015
On Library Market Share
Like all businesses and service providers, libraries compete, explicitly or implicitly, with other entities for market share. At the heart of this idea is that library leaders should care about the share of user needs they are fulfilling, even if the language of business is not always the most comfortable for them. Take content delivery–to what extent do users turn to Amazon over the library for books, and how is this changing with the development of ebooks? If we see…
Blog Post
February 11, 2015
Ethnographic Studies at a Community College
For the past two years, Ithaka S+R has been working with librarians and library staff at Montgomery College, the community college of Montgomery County, Maryland, to gain a better understanding of student work practices and preferences. Launched by Tanner Wray, director of the Montgomery College Libraries, the study draws inspiration from a previous project at the University of Maryland. Last year, a library team worked with Ithaka S+R to study library use on the Rockville campus; this…
Blog Post
January 26, 2015
Nancy Fried Foster Publishes New Book
Nancy Fried Foster, with co-authors Patricia Steele, David Cronrath, and Sandra Parsons Vicchio, has a new book: The Living Library: An Intellectual Ecosystem. From the publisher’s website: The Living Library describes the evolution of one possible future for academic libraries: as laboratories for cross-disciplinary investigation. At the University of Maryland, a collaboration among the Libraries, the School of Architecture and the Department of Anthropology led to the participation of students, faculty and staff in an initiative to design a full…
Blog Post
January 5, 2015
Using Evidence in the Design of Academic Library Spaces
For decades and even centuries, a new academic library could be built just like any other—on the same architectural plans and with the same scholarly accommodations in mind. But today this is no longer possible. Recent years have brought dramatic changes to academic work practices such as reading, writing, and communication. The means, speed, and extent of scholarly collaboration have also undergone tremendous development. The traditional library model that has sufficed for so many years can no longer suit these…