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Over the past decade, European funding agencies and cultural heritage organisations have invested significant resources in the creation of digital content in the not-for-profit sector. The grants have facilitated major digitisation and... more
Over the past decade, European funding agencies and cultural heritage organisations have invested significant resources in the creation of digital content in the not-for-profit sector. The grants have facilitated major digitisation and encouraged innovative work that paved the way for forms of scholarship and communities possible only in an online environment. However, the past decade of digitisation has not been without flaws. The systems that create content are still in a stage of experimentation, and the path from initial funding to long-term sustainability can be challenging. Despite financial investment, some undesirable outcomes have emerged: Digital projects return again to funders, because alternative revenue streams had not been developed; Completed projects whose online content would remain stagnant and/or little used once funded ended; Silo effect of having good content, but hosted on a variety of platforms, with no interoperability and low user discoverability Uncertain ...
Universities, libraries and cultural heritage institutions are creating a vast array of digital resources – virtual collections, databases and other online content – driven by the goals of sharing their holdings more broadly, furthering... more
Universities, libraries and cultural heritage institutions are creating a vast array of digital resources – virtual collections, databases and other online content – driven by the goals of sharing their holdings more broadly, furthering education and research opportunities, engaging with the public and extending their influence beyond their physical space. The institutions may fund the creation of these resources themselves or receive financial support from public and private funders who understand the substantial investment required. But once the resources are built, how sturdy are the structures in place to support them? In 2009, the JISC-led Strategic Content Alliance commissioned Ithaka S+R to investigate the sustainability strategies of twelve digital content projects in the higher education and cultural heritage sectors, located in the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany and Egypt, to see how their leaders were developing cost-management and revenue strategies t...
This study, conducted by Ithaka S+R, with funding from the Jisc-led Strategic Content Alliance, grew from the findings of earlier studies showing that both funders and project leaders alike rely very heavily on their host institutions to... more
This study, conducted by Ithaka S+R, with funding from the Jisc-led Strategic Content Alliance, grew from the findings of earlier studies showing that both funders and project leaders alike rely very heavily on their host institutions to support and sustain digital content, beyond the end of the grant. While the primary focus of this study is the lush, if unruly, terrain of higher education institutions, academia is not the only sector enjoying an era of digital growth. As museums and public-facing libraries seek to expand their reach beyond their physical spaces, digital activities have become a core part of their strategy. And so, as well as an assessment of the university environment as a “host” for digital content, this study includes a more exploratory look at how cultural heritage institutions think about and plan for sustaining and enhancing the value of their digital collections. The cultural sector offers very different models and allows us to draw initial conclusions aroun...
The making of maps is no longer restricted to the rarefied realm of cartographers. Students, scholars, and researchers in all fields have recognized the power that maps can bring to data of many kinds. Architectural scholars can integrate... more
The making of maps is no longer restricted to the rarefied realm of cartographers. Students, scholars, and researchers in all fields have recognized the power that maps can bring to data of many kinds. Architectural scholars can integrate digitized historical maps and demographic datasets to analyze changes over time in different neighborhoods; oceanographers can marry the bathymetric measurements to the configuration of the coastline and layer that with storm-related data to estimate storm surge in coastal communities. A historian explores geopolitical change over time, by layering political boundary lines and other features over a map of Africa. Thanks to easily available mapping software, it is increasingly easy to experiment with and build mapping projects to answer questions and share data. And yet, many of the tools and platforms that make this possible are part of for-profit businesses, such as Google or ESRI. Others, like Mapzen, are open source, but subject to the same vaga...
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This report aims to address one of the biggest challenges facing libraries and cultural heritage organizations: how to move their special collections into the 21st century through digitization while developing successful strategies to... more
This report aims to address one of the biggest challenges facing libraries and cultural heritage organizations: how to move their special collections into the 21st century through digitization while developing successful strategies to make sure those collections remain accessible and relevant over time. Through a cooperative agreement as part of the National Leadership Grants Program, the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) funded the Association of Research Libraries (ARL), in partnership with Ithaka S+R, to undertake in-depth case studies of institutions that have worked to build the audience, infrastructure, and funding models necessary to maintain and grow their digital collections. The eight collections profiled provide useful models and examples of good practice for project leaders to consider when digitizing their own materials. We hope that these case studies will encourage greater discussion among individuals in the academic library and cultural heritage communi...
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This project will develop a plan to optimize the SHARE aggregator and data set for digital humanities in consultation with scholars, institutions, and centers. Given the dispersed nature of modern scholarship, a digital humanities project... more
This project will develop a plan to optimize the SHARE aggregator and data set for digital humanities in consultation with scholars, institutions, and centers. Given the dispersed nature of modern scholarship, a digital humanities project may produce more than one book or article manuscript, each published on a different publisher’s website, any number of pre-prints on institutional repositories or pre-print servers, data sets and code books on Dryad or Figshare, and text mining or cleaning scripts on github. With many digital humanities projects based in academic departments, such project components may be housed semi-permanently in web-publishing platforms like Omeka without formal integration with library discovery systems or other services to link them to similar projects. As part of a growing open infrastructure movement, the SHARE platform links scholarly activity across the research lifecycle and makes it available as enhanced, free, open metadata. The project team will admin...
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... discipline. Yet one of the challenges was that no listing for new model resources exists. ... Page 6. Page 6 www.arl.org/bm~doc/current-models-report.pdf Current Models of Digital Scholarly Communication November 2008 The ...