Topic: Museums
Blog Post
July 26, 2021
SAA 2021 Annual Meeting
What to Watch For
Next month, archivists from across the country will convene virtually to discuss emerging and ongoing issues in the field at the Society of American Archivists (SAA) Annual Meeting, ARCHIVES*RECORDS 2021: Together/Apart. This year’s meeting will take place from August 4 to 6 (with some pre-conference activities earlier in the week) and will showcase 10 live sessions and 20 pre-recorded sessions with live Q&As. The conference will feature keynote speakers, general sessions, networking opportunities,…
Past Event
August 5, 2021
Makala Skinner at SAA’s ARCHIVES*RECORDS 2021
On August 5 and 6, join Makala Skinner to learn more about the A*CENSUS survey, which is a large scale census of archivists. The details for each session are below: 5:00 PM – 6:00 PM EDT on Thursday, August 5 Conversation Lounge: Research and Innovation @ SAA: A*CENSUS II SAA has received funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) to conduct a major research initiative: the second large-scale census of archivists. A lot has changed…
Blog Post
June 28, 2021
Evaluating Success in the Midst of a Protracted Pandemic
Four Guiding Principles
There was a “before” and there will be an “after,” but how do we evaluate success while at our current locus—somewhere in the nebulous middle of a prolonged pandemic? More than a year into the pandemic, many evaluations are being conducted using measures of success that were established in a radically different context. The environment has shifted, and the goals and definitions of success for items under evaluation—everything…
Blog Post
April 15, 2021
Three Questions for Kara Bledsoe
On April 1, Kara Bledsoe joined Ithaka S+R’s Libraries, Scholarly Communication, and Museums team. In this interview, she reflects on what brought her to Ithaka S+R and what she hopes to accomplish through her work with us. What attracted you to Ithaka S+R? My background is in management consulting for cultural organizations. I drafted strategic plans, facilitated visioning workshops, and evaluated clients’ operations to help them optimize the balance between market forces and their missions. Most of the research…
Blog Post
April 5, 2021
Three Considerations for Inclusively and Responsibly Analyzing and Reporting on Demographics
Over the last several months, we’ve shared Ithaka S+R strategies for ensuring inclusivity in writing and selecting demographic questions—key steps in the early stages of the data collection planning process. But inclusivity concerns don’t stop once data collection has begun, but continue when a survey is put into the field, an interview is conducted, or administrative data collection is facilitated. Ensuring proper care in collecting and…
Blog Post
March 23, 2021
Teaching with Primary Sources: Pre-Pandemic Lessons for Post-COVID Futures
The second iteration in Ithaka S+R’s Teaching Support Services project investigates the teaching practices and support needs of instructors who work with primary source materials. Today we are excited to publish the project’s capstone report. Still in the pandemic but beginning to glimpse life on the other side, now is an opportune time to begin to envision not just the future, but the many potential futures…
Research Report
March 23, 2021
Teaching with Primary Sources
Looking at the Support Needs of Instructors
Encounters with primary sources—historical or contemporary artifacts that bear direct witness to a specific period or event—are central to the pedagogy of many disciplines, especially in the humanities and humanistic social sciences. Their use in undergraduate instruction aligns with universities’ commitments to experiential and inquiry-based learning and library initiatives focused on media and information literacy. Reflecting the importance of the topic within higher education, “Supporting Teaching with Primary Sources” attracted the largest cohort of any Ithaka S+R program to date.
Blog Post
January 28, 2021
Convening the Cohort
Teaching with Digital Cultural Heritage Materials in the Pandemic
Last summer we announced a Mellon funded project to study how higher education instructors are adapting their practices of teaching with cultural heritage materials during the pandemic. In this post we share how our project is developing and the issues we are tracking as our research gets underway. Why are we doing this project? We remain in a similarly unprecedented landscape six months later, as the COVID-19 virus remains a terrible threat. Technology has allowed certain types of activities…
Blog Post
January 11, 2021
When to Ask (or Not Ask) Demographic Questions
People are becoming increasingly uncomfortable with sharing personal information—like email addresses, names of their spouses, and demographics such as race-ethnicity and gender—with their employers and other organizations more broadly. Many people are concerned about their privacy as more and more data are collected in a wide range of contexts. Some are apprehensive about research and associated data collection in general due to its history of racism, sexism, and other forms of discrimination and mistreatment in a…
Blog Post
December 3, 2020
An Updated Snapshot of the Archival Profession
Gearing up for A*CENSUS II
In 2004, the Society of American Archivists led A*CENSUS, the first broadscale survey of individual archivists in the United States in nearly thirty years. The initiative resulted in tremendous impact for the archival field. For institutions and professional organizations, the data informed the design of new curricula and the assessment of current educational offerings; for archival institutions, the opportunity to advocate for resources, set goals, and benchmark against peers; and for researchers, the…
Blog Post
November 18, 2020
Four Strategies for Crafting Inclusive and Effective Demographic Questions
At Ithaka S+R, we regularly re-evaluate the quality and inclusivity of the demographic questions we include in our surveys, just as we do with all of the items in our instruments. These questions undergo a rigorous, iterative revision process: we conduct desk research, gather feedback from advisors, test all questions with potential participants prior to launching, and pay attention to trends in open-ended responses to our questions. All of these approaches, along with following trends in research and…
Blog Post
November 12, 2020
Findings from the Inaugural Art Museum Director Survey
Benchmarking Perspectives from Early 2020
Today, Jennifer Frederick and I published findings from the inaugural art museum director survey, funded by the Samuel H. Kress Foundation and conducted in partnership with the Association of Art Museum Directors and the American Alliance of Museums. The survey captures the perspectives of directors from a moment in time before the COVID-19 pandemic forced closures of museums in the US, and before the killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor sparked major protests against police brutality…
Research Report
November 12, 2020
Ithaka S+R Art Museum Director Survey 2020
Art museums serve a unique social role in that they operate between the public sphere, the academy, the art market, and the philanthropic sector. They are invaluable resources for scholars and also serve school children, adults, seniors while engaging broadly in the cultural life of their cities. Beyond these roles, they also have the responsibility to maintain and care for a collection of objects for future generations in perpetuity. The Ithaka S+R Art Museum Director Survey 2020 examines strategy and…
Blog Post
November 11, 2020
The Relationships That Drive Campus Collaborations
How Museums and Libraries Grapple With Institutional Barriers Towards Working Together
As collecting institutions on campus, libraries and museums have a great deal to learn from each other. Libraries have excelled in adapting to digital environments, a development that has served them especially well during the COVID-19 pandemic. Academic museums have grown increasingly sophisticated as public spaces, serving as an access point for local communities and visitors of all kinds on otherwise exclusive campuses. In this way, notable competencies have emerged in the library sector towards breadth of access…
Research Report
November 10, 2020
Structuring Collaborations
The Opportunities and Challenges of Building Relationships Between Academic Museums and Libraries
In 2019 Ithaka S+R received funding from the Mellon Foundation to study the structural relationships between academic museums and libraries. Ithaka S+R conducted interviews with museum and library directors, and in some cases other senior staff, at thirty universities. Based on these interviews, three institutions were selected for short case studies as examples of effective collaborations: University of Iowa, the Atlanta University Center, and Princeton University.
Blog Post
October 6, 2020
Ithaka S+R Is Hiring
Two New Analyst Job Openings
Are you passionate about higher education and the arts? Our work helps these organizations and their support providers—including libraries, publishers, scholarly societies, and museums— enhance scholarship, instruction, community engagement, and student success. Ithaka S+R is hiring for two new positions that will work on some of our most exciting research and advisory projects. Both roles will work collaboratively on research projects that lead to publications including grant-funded research…
Blog Post
August 19, 2020
Exploring the Effectiveness and Durability of Digital Preservation and Curation Services
Announcing a New Research Project Funded by IMLS
With generous funding from the Institute of Library and Museum Services (IMLS), we are pleased to initiate an 18-month research project to examine and assess how digital preservation and curation systems (DPCS) are developed, deployed, and sustained. Because our cultural, historic, and scientific heritage is increasingly being produced and shared in digital forms, libraries, archives, and museums are increasingly dependent on digital platforms to support the curation, discovery, and long-term management of digital…
Blog Post
August 17, 2020
Teaching with Cultural Heritage Online During the Pandemic
New Mellon-Funded Project
Today we are excited to announce a new project funded by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation that will explore how teaching and learning with cultural heritage collections and materials is evolving in response to the pandemic. Instructors who seek to use cultural heritage objects from museums, archives, and special collections face unique challenges when adapting to remote teaching. What is needed is deeper understanding of, and better support for these instructors in this current moment. This…
Blog Post
June 12, 2020
How Will Museums Live Up to their Solidarity Commitments?
Last week at the American Alliance of Museums Virtual meeting, Dr. Johnnetta B. Cole, Secretary Lonnie Bunch, and Lori Fogarty discussed the protests that have erupted across the country and around the world, in order to start a dialogue about the museum’s role in confronting structural racism in America. Since the reignition of Black Lives Matter protests by George Floyd’s murder, many museums…
Blog Post
May 26, 2020
Measuring What Matters
Equity, Diversity, Inclusion, and Accessibility in Academic Library Strategic Plans
Equity, diversity, inclusion, and accessibility have become buzzwords across the higher education sector with leaders at many institutions asserting these as strategic priorities and key values. In our most recent national survey of US academic library directors, conducted in fall 2019, we included new coverage of these important topics. And, now, as we face an academic year that will likely be shaped by budget cuts and re-prioritization, we wonder about the degree to…