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Topic: Collections and preservation

Past Event
November 6, 2019

Legacy Missions in Times of Change: Defining and Shaping Collections in the 21st Century

Oya Rieger at the Charleston Conference

On Wednesday, November 6, from 2:00 – 3:00 pm, Oya Y. Rieger will speak on “Legacy Missions in Times of Change: Defining and Shaping Collections in the 21st Century” at the Charleston Conference. She will be joined by the University of Kentucky Libraries’ Antje Mays. For more information and to register, please see the conference website. About the session Despite the rapidly changing information and technology landscape, collections continue to be at the heart of academic libraries, signifying their…
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…
Past Event
November 6, 2019

Resolved: Preprint Servers Have Improved the Scholarly Communication System

Oya Rieger at the Charleston Conference

On Wednesday, November 6, from 4:45 – 5:45 pm, Oya Y. Rieger is taking part in a “Hyde Park Debate” at the Charleston Conference. Oya will argue in favor of the proposition: Resolved: Preprint servers have improved the scholarly communication system.” Taking the opposing side is Kent Anderson (Caldera Publishing Solutions). Rick Anderson will serve as moderator and timekeeper. For more information and to register, please see the conference website. From the conference website The structure of the event…
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
June 6, 2019

Legacy Missions in Times of Change

New Issue Brief on Library Collections

Regardless of the rapidly changing information and technology landscape, collections continue to be at the heart of academic libraries, signifying their role in providing access to our cultural heritage. But in an increasingly networked, distributed, licensed environment, how do we define the library collection? What do collections imply? What is involved in building a collection?  The purpose of the brief…
Issue Brief
June 6, 2019

What’s a Collection Anyway?

In 1953, Kenneth J. Braugh stated that the mission of Harvard’s library was to collect and preserve everything. Those days are long gone. For the last couple of decades, given the rapid expansion of scholarly content sources and types, even the best-funded research libraries have become cognizant that a comprehensive collection is an unattainable vision. Nevertheless, many research library mission statements continue to give prominence to their role in making the world’s knowledge accessible to a wide range of user…
Blog Post
June 3, 2019

Three questions for Carrie Corneilus, Sara Morris, Rebecca Orozco, and Michael Peper

Participants Reflect on the Indigenous Studies Research Support Services Project

For our quarterly newsletter, we interviewed Carrie Corneilus, a librarian at Haskell Indian Nations University, and Sara Morris, Rebecca Orozco, and Michael Peper, librarians at the University of Kansas (KU), about their participation in the Research Support Services project on Indigenous Studies. The two universities collaborated in a unique partnership to  interview Indigenous Studies scholars. 1. Why did you want to participate in this study? Carrie Corneilus: I am a tribal librarian of students and faculty…
Past Event
May 23, 2019

What Key Faculty Findings Reveal for Libraries

Melissa Blankstein and Christine Wolff-Eisenberg Present at Library Connect Webinar

On Thursday, May 23, from 11:00 am – noon (EST), Melissa Blankstein and Christine Wolff-Eisenberg are presenting on the findings from the US Faculty Survey for Elsevier’s Library Connect. To register, please see the Library Connect website. About the webinar Would you like to explore opportunities to evolve or shape new library services based on quantitative data? Join us for a presentation of the Ithaka S+R Faculty Survey. The presenters will share insights into faculty research, teaching and publishing…
Past Event
June 14, 2019

Roger Schonfeld to Deliver Keynote Address at METRO Library Council Symposium

On Friday, June 14, Roger Schonfeld is delivering the morning keynote address at the METRO Library Council’s Symposium, “If We Build It…: Sustainable Funding in Libraries and Archives.” Roger’s talk, “Sustaining and Sunsetting Innovation and Collaboration,” begins at 10:00 am, and the symposium is being held at the METRO Library Council offices in New York City. For more information and to register, please see the symposium’s event page.  …
Past Event
May 20, 2019

National Survey: Local Findings

Join Us for a Webinar on May 20

Last month, we published the US Faculty Survey 2018, a national survey that tracks the research, teaching, and publishing practices of higher education faculty members at four-year colleges and universities. Thirteen libraries fielded a local version of the Ithaka S+R faculty survey concurrently with the national survey, and we are pleased to be hosting a webinar featuring librarians from two of these institutions. National Survey, Local Findings: Two Librarians Share the Impact of the Ithaka S+R…
Past Event
May 31, 2019

Roger Schonfeld Delivers Keynote Address at OhioLINK Summit 2019

On Friday, May 31, Roger Schonfeld will deliver a keynote address on the future of the ILS at the OhioLINK Summit 2019. The conference, which is open to OhioLINK members, will be held at OCLC’s conference center in Dublin, Ohio. For more information, please see the OhioLINK website.
Blog Post
April 29, 2019

You Asked, We’ve Answered

Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey 2018 FAQs

Earlier this month, we were thrilled to release the Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey 2018 at the ACRL 2019 conference in Cleveland in a standing-room-only session with 200+ conferences attendees. We subsequently had the opportunity share results from the survey via webinar on April 17th with 250+ attendees (the webinar recording is available here). We received so many thoughtful questions and comments during these presentations and wanted to take the…
Blog Post
April 16, 2019

When Research is Relational

New Report on Supporting the Research Practices of Indigenous Studies Scholars

I am excited to announce the publication of the capstone report from Ithaka S+R’s Indigenous Studies project, which brought together teams at eleven academic libraries to study the research support needs of Indigenous Studies scholars. Indigenous Studies places Indigenous perspectives at the center of inquiry, with unique protocols for defining, describing, sharing, and preserving information. The project provided a unique opportunity for academic librarians to come together, learn from Indigenous…
Blog Post
April 12, 2019

The Research, Teaching, and Publishing Practices of Faculty

US Faculty Survey 2018

This morning we published the US Faculty Survey 2018. Through this national survey, we have tracked the research, teaching, and publishing practices of higher education faculty members at four year colleges and universities on a triennial basis since 2000. Our aim in this project is to provide actionable findings and analysis to help colleges and universities as well as relevant support services, such as academic libraries, learned societies, and scholarly publishers,…
Research Report
April 12, 2019

Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey 2018

The Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey has tracked the changing research, teaching, and publishing practices of higher education faculty members on a triennial basis since 2000. Our aim in this project is to provide actionable findings and analysis to help colleges and universities as well as relevant support services, such as academic libraries, learned societies, and scholarly publishers, plan for the future.
Research Report
April 11, 2019

When Research is Relational

Supporting the Research Practices of Indigenous Studies Scholars

In 2017 Ithaka S+R launched a project to explore the changing research methods and practices of Indigenous Studies scholars across Canada and the US with the goal of identifying services to better support them in ways that are also beneficial to Indigenous communities more broadly. The project was undertaken by a cohort of research teams at 11 academic libraries with guidance from a group of advisors comprised of Indigenous scholars and librarians. Each research team in the cohort developed findings…
Blog Post
April 8, 2019

Learning from the Locals

How Local Survey Partnerships Have Enriched the Ithaka S+R US Faculty Survey 2018

In 2012, Ithaka S+R began offering colleges and universities the opportunity to field a customized instance of the US Faculty Survey, which tracks the research and teaching practices, perceptions, and needs of faculty members at four-year colleges and universities on a triennial basis. In more recent years, we began fielding our parallel surveys of undergraduate and graduate students as a means to gain better insight into the needs of these important stakeholders. To…
Blog Post
March 6, 2019

Scale Is Existential

New Issue Brief on Library Collaborations

For more than a hundred years, academic libraries in North America have understood that they must seek scale greater than that of their own institution in order to provide the collections and services that their communities need. In search of cross institutional scale, libraries have developed an array of consortia and other collaborative vehicles. But as the nature of the collections libraries seek to provide, and the services that their user communities require, has evolved, so must their…
Issue Brief
March 6, 2019

Restructuring Library Collaboration

Strategy, Membership, Governance

Academic libraries typically serve individual higher education institutions, yet their objectives require that they achieve greater negotiating power, more efficient distribution of collections, and stronger systems and services than even the largest academic library can provide itself. As a result, academic libraries have sought for more than a century to generate cross-institutional scale. In this paper, I examine efforts to generate that scale, including consortia and other membership organizations, which collectively I term “collaborative vehicles.” Yet collaboration is not good…