Topic: Libraries

"Funding for Sustainability: How Funders’ Practices Influence the Future of Digital Resources" offers an overview of funders' policies and practices, and provides a framework to assist funders and their grantees in thinking about the key elements of post-grant sustainability planning for digital resources. Over the past decade, philanthropic organizations and government agencies have invested millions of dollars, pounds, and euros in the creation of digital content in the not-for-profit sector. Their grants have facilitated major digitization efforts and encouraged innovative…

The University of Southampton’s Hartley Library has been engaged in a number of large scale, grant funded digitization initiatives focused on heritage materials such as parliamentary papers and British pamphlets. These projects left them with a challenge familiar to many grant-funded projects: developing a strategy to preserve access to the content after the grant period concluded. Early experiences suggested to library leadership that they were not well positioned to host this content locally, so with subsequent projects they began to…

DigiZeitschriften, a German language archive of scholarly journals, was created in 1999 with funding from the German Research Foundation. Since its launch as an online service in 2005, DigiZeitschriften has implemented a sustainability model that includes a partnership of libraries contributing time and expertise, and a financial model of institutional subscriptions that has more than covered its operating costs to date. This case study examines the decisions leading DigiZeitschriften to adopt this plan for sustainability, and explores the benefits as…

This research is part of a multi-year, international exploration of the strategies being used to support digital initiatives over the long term. In 2008, we selected twelve projects to examine, analyzing the steps their project leaders have taken to achieve sustainability, with special attention paid to their strategies for cost management and revenue generation. "Sustaining Digital Resources: An On-the-Ground View of Projects Today" serves as a guide to the cases, outlining the stages that successful projects undertake in developing sustainability…

After several years of reliance on foundation support, Oxford University’s Electronic Enlightenment (EE), a database containing the digitized correspondence of over 6,000 thinkers and writers from the long 18th century, needed to transition from a grant funded project to an independently sustainable research project. After hiring a business planning consultant to help them think through different options, project leadership concluded that a sustainability model based on institutional subscriptions to the resource was the best fit for the project’s needs. In…

The challenges of digitizing, preserving and providing access to over 1,000 years’ worth of material held by The National Archives (TNA) are considerable. In recent years, TNA has developed a strategy to digitize content quickly though its Licensed Internet Associates program. These commercial partnerships, closely managed by TNA staff, have allowed the institution to digitize millions of pages of material at minimal direct cost. This case study explores the model developed by TNA in light of the opportunities that commercial…

Endowments are often thought of as a source of reliable support for established institutions such as universities and foundations, but in recent years online academic resources have also begun experimenting with the endowment model as a means of sustainable funding. The model holds forth the promise of guaranteeing access to a resource in perpetuity, with the investment returns from the endowment continuously generating funds to sustain the resource. Since 2004, the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has successfully raised three-quarters of…

The transition of scholarly journals from print to electronic formats is affecting libraries and publishers in numerous ways. Based on several projects we had conducted on this transition, examining libraries and publishers alike, this article provided recommendations for library leaders about how best to manage the transition. Some key issues covered included responsive vs. strategic management of the process, special needs for journals from smaller publishers, infrastructure planning, and preservation considerations.