Topic: Libraries
Research Report
November 20, 2013
Quakers and Slavery
Haverford College
Shared infrastructure supports long-term sustainability and modest growth Launched in 2009, Quakers and Slavery is an online collection of letters, images, and other materials related to the role of Quakers in the American abolition movement. A collaboration between Haverford College and Swarthmore College, the collection aligns closely with the missions of these Quaker-founded institutions. Quakers and Slavery is one of the most visited sites on Triptych, the platform for digitized special collections shared by the Tri-College partnership of Haverford, Swarthmore,…
Research Report
November 20, 2013
Vanderbilt Television News Archive
Vanderbilt University
Securing institutional support for a national mission On August 5, 1968, Vanderbilt University Libraries (then, the Joint University Libraries) began recording, preserving, and providing access to the news broadcasts of the three national networks. Since then, Vanderbilt has captured more than 40,000 hours of news broadcasts, creating the largest collection of American broadcast news in the world. Most remarkable about this case is the longevity of the Television News Archive. The Archive has always been financially challenged, but it has…
Issue Brief
August 29, 2013
The Space Between
The well-known Ithaka S+R Faculty Survey expanded beyond US faculty members in 2012 to include academics in the UK. We now have a fascinating window for assessing a variety of aspects of national higher education systems, affording us the opportunity to examine their comparative positioning and to consider a variety of possible policy interventions.
Issue Brief
August 1, 2013
Can’t Buy Us Love
The Declining Importance of Library Books and the Rising Importance of Special Collections
Introduction Research libraries throughout North America are experiencing a massive decline in the use of their general collections[1]—their large and comprehensive collections of printed books and journal volumes purchased in the commercial marketplace. This decline is the inevitable outcome of a massive shift in scholarly publishing from an analog and print-based to a digital and networked one. In this environment, it is no longer obvious that it makes sense for research libraries to continue their traditional practice of…
Research Report
May 14, 2013
Ithaka S+R | Jisc | RLUK
UK Survey of Academics 2012
The UK Survey of Academics 2012, conducted by Ithaka S+R, Jisc, and Research Libraries UK (RLUK), examines the attitudes and behaviours of academics at higher education institutions across the United Kingdom. Our objective is to provide the entire sector, including universities, learned societies, scholarly publishers, and especially academic libraries, with timely findings and analysis that help them plan for the future. The Survey of Academics covers broadly the population of academics across the UK, as well as the opportunity to look…
Research Report
February 21, 2013
Appraising our Digital Investment
Sustainability of Digitized Special Collections in ARL Libraries
Sponsored by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) and conducted by Ithaka S+R, this study provides insight into how ARL libraries are managing and funding the hundreds of digitized special collections they have created and that they believe to be critical to their futures. This is the first survey of ARL institutions that specifically attempts to understand and benchmark the activities and costs of supporting these collections after they are created. By looking at questions of management, costs, funding sources,…
Blog Post
February 12, 2013
New Ithaka S+R Research Support Services Project in Art History
This winter, as part of the Research Support Services program, Ithaka S+R is launching a new investigation of researcher practices and support services needs in the field of art history. Our goal is to examine the evolving needs of researchers on a field-specific basis in order to best understand how libraries and other information services providers meet these needs. We are grateful to the Getty Foundation and the Samuel H. Kress Foundation for their joint funding of this project. Our…
Research Report
January 29, 2013
Sustaining Our Digital Future
Institutional Strategies for Digital Content
A great deal of the digital content that libraries and scholars create is expected to endure. However, the responsibility of maintaining the ongoing operation and enhancement of this content remains undefined. With the generous support of Jisc, Ithaka S+R was able to examine the strategies that institutions have in place for supporting digital content resources beyond their initial construction and implementation. “Sustaining Our Digital Future” is both an assessment of the university environment as a host for digital content and…
Blog Post
November 20, 2012
Sustainable Scholarship Conference 2012
Videos Now Available
ITHAKA hosted our annual Sustainable Scholarship Conference in October, bringing together librarians, publishers, scholarly society leaders, and a variety of others interested in how higher education is changing as a result of new technologies. This year’s theme was “The Question of Quality: New Forms of Grading, Credentialing, and Peer Review in the Digital World.” Videos of the presentations are now available online. Here are some highlights: Keynote: Kevin Guthrie, president of ITHAKA, focused on some of the key…
Blog Post
November 8, 2012
Library Assessment and the Research Support Services for Scholars Program
Last week I presented at the 2012 Library Assessment Conference in Charlottesville, Virginia, where we previewed some of the results from two projects that are part of our Research Support Services for Scholars program. These projects take a closer look at the research support needs of historians (funded by the NEH in the US) and chemists (funded by the JISC in the UK). The conference proceedings led me to reflect on some of issues in the assessment…
Blog Post
September 10, 2012
Ithaka S+R Faculty Survey 2012 is being fielded for US higher education
Ithaka S+R has this morning launched the 2012 cycle of our triennial Faculty Survey for US higher education. We are sending invitation emails to tens of thousands of faculty members across the US to ask them to participate, and we are grateful to the many faculty members who will take the time to respond. Their responses will allow us provide colleges and universities, libraries, scholarly societies, and academic publishers with insight into the evolving attitudes and practices of scholars…
Blog Post
July 10, 2012
The Kanazawa Institute of Technology’s Library Roundtable Reaches a Milestone
Nearly every library recognizes the importance of global collaboration, but did you know that there is a Japan-US library program that has been operating for 30 years? The Kanazawa Institute of Technology’s Library Roundtable celebrated its 30th anniversary last week, and I had the pleasure of taking part in the program. The Japan-US library program started as a thank-you gesture from the director, Dr. Sakai of the KIT Library, who served as deputy director of the National Diet Library after…
Blog Post
June 28, 2012
Dispatches from ALA
At the ALA Annual Meeting this past weekend, I participated in two workshops that, while on very different topics, provide an interesting snapshot of how libraries are changing today. ACRL is continuing its interest in analyzing the value of academic libraries by hosting a workshop with library leaders to develop a future research agenda for this area of work. Spearheaded with Megan Oakleaf’s major literature review on the value of academic libraries and continuing more recently with summit meetings…
Blog Post
June 20, 2012
2010 Library Survey Dataset Now Available
Ithaka S+R’s ongoing survey research projects form a cornerstone of our efforts to understand how academic behaviors and practices are changing, and how service providers adapt. These surveys include the triennial Ithaka S+R Faculty Survey – last run in 2009 and now in planning for fall 2012 – as well as our Library Survey, which was most recently fielded in 2010 and focuses on the strategies that library administrators are pursuing for their libraries. In addition to coverage in…
Blog Post
May 30, 2012
Preservation on Display at University of Chicago’s Mansueto Library
One of the best things about the Association of Research Libraries spring meetings is that they are held in different parts of the country and hosted by member libraries in these areas. This year’s meeting was held in Chicago, and even though we met in the Downtown Marriott, we were transported by bus on the evening of Wednesday, May 4 to the University of Chicago for a reception and tour of the new Mansueto Library. It was worth the trip!…
Blog Post
May 9, 2012
Video Series on Sustaining Digital Resources
Since 2007, Ithaka S+R and the Strategic Content Alliance (SCA) have been working together to examine the challenges that the academic and cultural heritage communities face in making sure that the digital resources they create will endure and provide value well beyond their initial creation. These short videos offer an introduction to our research on the sustainability of digital resources, and include useful guidance for those managing projects at universities, museums, and libraries. Feel free to view, embed or…
Research Report
October 6, 2011
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy 2011
Launching a "Freemium" Model
The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (SEP), a peer reviewed, open access online reference, draws its funding from investment returns from a project endowment, built from the financial contributions of academic libraries. When we first studied the project, it had made great progress toward its goal of building a $4.125 million endowment, but it faced uncertainty over the extent to which the economic downturn in 2008 would affect its investments. In the two years since then, as endowment support has not…
Research Report
October 6, 2011
University of Southampton Library Digitisation Unit 2011
Reimagining the Value Proposition
When the original case study was published in 2009, the staff of the BOPCRIS Digitization Centre at the University of Southampton’s Hartley Library had recently completed three large scale, grant funded digitization projects and was exploring different means of ensuring access to the digital content they had created. An early experiment with local hosting had shown that the Library was unprepared to deal with the on-going costs of maintaining these resources, and they turned to external content providers—ProQuest and JSTOR—for…
Research Report
October 6, 2011
Electronic Enlightenment (EE) 2011
Outreach or Outsource? The Benefits and Challenges of Partnership, Case Study Update 2011
In 2008 the Electronic Enlightenment launched efforts to transition to an institutional subscription model, part of its long-term plan for sustaining itself beyond the period of grant funding. Now housed at Oxford’s Bodleian Library and working with Oxford University Press as its sales, marketing and distribution partner, Electronic Enlightenment is still in the process of building its subscriber base, a task made more challenging by the impact of the recession on library budgets. This update reports on the challenges EE…
Research Report
October 6, 2011
The Middle School Portal 2: Math and Science Pathways, National Science Digital Library 2011
The Challenges of Sustaining a Project as the End of a Grant Approaches
The original case study, "The Middle School Portal 2 (MSP2): Math and Science Pathways, National Science Digital Library: Early Sustainability Planning for a Grant-Funded Digital Library," profiled a new grant-supported initiative: a portal devoted to collecting high-quality teaching resources for use by middle school educators. The resource was part of the National Science Foundation’s National Science Digital Library (NSDL) program, a collection of online resources for educators in STEM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics). In the first year of…