FYI...
Bernie Sloan
--- On Wed, 4/7/10, Ross Housewright <[log in to unmask]> wrote:
From: Ross Housewright <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Ithaka S+R Faculty Survey 2009: Strategic Insights for Librarians, Publishers, and Societies
To: "[log in to unmask]" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Wednesday, April 7, 2010, 1:03 PM
Dear colleagues,
We are writing to announce the release of results from Ithaka S+R’s fourth faculty survey in the last decade, which examines changes in faculty attitudes towards the academic library, information resources, and the scholarly communications system as a whole.
In a published report, Faculty Survey 2009: Strategic Insights for Librarians, Publishers, and Societies, Ithaka S+R analyzes responses from over 3,000 faculty members based at US four-year colleges or universities and offers a unique comparative look at 2009 against previous surveys from 2000, 2003, and 2006 on a variety of key questions facing information service organizations and their parent institutions.
Trends in faculty attitudes and behaviors on issues ranging from the library as information gateway and the need for preservation of scholarly material, to their engagement with institutional and disciplinary repositories and thoughts about open access are addressed. For the first time, Ithaka S+R also looked at the role that scholarly societies play and their value to faculty.
Some of the key findings of this report include:
· Basic scholarly information use practices have shifted rapidly in recent years and, as a result, the academic library is increasingly being disintermediated from the discovery process, risking irrelevance in one if its core areas.
· Faculty members’ growing comfort in relying exclusively on digital versions of scholarly materials opens new opportunities for libraries, new business models for publishers, and new challenges for preservation.
· Despite several years of sustained efforts by publishers, scholarly societies, libraries, faculty members, and others to reform various aspects of the scholarly communications system, a fundamentally conservative set of faculty attitudes continues to impede systematic change.
The full report is freely available at http://bit.ly/aJP4pl. Results will also be presented at the Coalition for Networked Information Spring Meeting in Washington D.C. on April 12, 2010.
Please feel free to contact us with any questions or comments – we look forward to discussing these findings with you!
Sincerely,
Roger Schonfeld & Ross Housewright
Ithaka S+R (www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r) is the strategy and research arm of ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization dedicated to helping the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways. The Ithaka S+R team supports innovation in higher education by working with initiatives and organizations to develop sustainable business models and by conducting research and analysis on the impact of digital media on the academic community as a whole. Insights from these efforts are shared broadly, with more than a dozen reports freely available online. JSTOR, an accessible archive of more than 1,000 scholarly journals and other content, and Portico, a service that preserves scholarly content published in electronic form for future generations, are also part of ITHAKA.
