Ithaka Report

Ithaka's 2006 Studies of Key Stakeholders in the Digital Transformation in Higher Education.

August 18, 2008

The report, based on a survey of faculty members to determine their attitudes related to online resources, electronic archiving, teaching and learning and related subjects, suggests a number of specific lessons for libraries:

*The library is in many ways falling off the radar screens of faculty. Although scholars report general respect for libraries and librarians, the library is increasingly disintermediated from their actual research process. Many researchers circumvent the library in doing their research, preferring to access resources directly.

*In a networked world, scholarship increasingly occurs across disciplinary or institutional boundaries, challenging the ability of any individual node to alone support this work. Historically isolated campuses and libraries must come to think of themselves as parts of a larger whole, and develop tools and strategies for effective collaboration.

*For a campus or its library to create a viable information strategy for a competitive environment, it must develop and maintain a thorough understanding of the needs of its important constituents. In the case of the library, both the library leadership as well as individual librarians should be reaching out to faculty members, formally and informally, to understand the nature of their teaching and research projects and how their needs are being met or could be met better.

*Despite the growing significance of information to scientists, the role of the library is diminishing in importance fastest among this group. Libraries are providing these high-growth fields value in the acquisition of resources—for example in licensing costly journal collections—but otherwise have been relatively absent from the workflow of these high-growth fields, with an associated decline in perceived value.

http://www.ithaka.org/research/Ithakas%202006%20Studies%20of%20Key%20Stakeholders%20in%20the%20Digital%20Transformation%20in%20Higher%20Education.pdf

(OCLC Abstracts)