Aligning Investments with the Digital Evolution

Latest Survey of Over 3,000 US-Based Faculty Reveals Strategic Insights

for Leaders and Decision-Makers in Higher Education

April 7, 2010 – New York, NY – Ithaka S+R released today results from its fourth faculty survey in the last decade examining 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.

“Faculty views are moving in clear directions. Libraries, publishers, and societies need to be attuned to this and, in some cases, to dramatically shift gears or even to catch up.” said Roger C. Schonfeld, Ithaka S+R Manager of Research. “Based on our findings, for example, libraries could consider moving even more rapidly away from print-based holdings, and they should be very cautious in making costly investments in local finding aids for online information as their role as gateway continues to wane. They should also be aware that the value of institutional repositories remains tenuous in the eyes of faculty.”

In addition to possible areas for strategic re-thinking, the report also reveals some new opportunities on the horizon. One of the bigger questions raised is whether faculty will require tailored information solutions to meet their needs over time. Google and Google Scholar play increasingly important roles in their research, but specialized disciplinary sources for scholarship do as well. This is an area where the need for new services deeply knowledgeable about and able to serve particular research interests – whether provided by libraries, publishers, societies or others – may be on the rise.

Among the most valuable aspects of the work done by Ithaka S+R and utilized in the report, is the analysis of trend data and the study of faculty by discipline. “Faculty attitudes are changing, but it is evolutionary” said Laura Brown, Ithaka S+R Managing Director, “After ten years, we are now seeing clear trajectories emerge and the places where all faculty are aligned and where they diverge. We hope the work we have done helps organizations in the higher education community to position themselves for success in the future, armed with the knowledge of what changes can be made that will serve faculty as a whole.”

The full report is freely available at: http://www.ithaka.org/ithaka-s-r/research/faculty-surveys-2000-2009/facu.... Results will also be presented at the Coalition for Networked Information Spring Meeting in Washington D.C. on April 12, 2010.

Ithaka S+R
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 1,200 scholarly journals and other content, and Portico, a service that preserves content published in electronic form for future generations, are also part of ITHAKA.

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Hillary LaMont
Assistant, Marketing & Communications
ITHAKA
Tel: 212-358-6405
hillary.lamont@ithaka.org

~ Coverage for More than 20,000 Journals—Adding Even Greater Breadth
to the Already Immense EDS Base Index ~

IPSWICH, Mass. — April 8, 2010 — A new partnership will add the British Library’s Electronic Table of Contents File (ETOC) to EBSCO Discovery Service™ (EDS). ETOC was created to identify journal articles and conference papers from the British Library’s Document Supply collections. ETOC includes more than 36.5 million records providing broad subject coverage across all academic disciplines with 2.5 million articles being added each year.

ETOC combines article-level access to the top 20,000 research journals requested from the British Library along with papers from 16,000 annual conference proceedings—totaling nearly 40 million records. The content goes back to 1993 and ETOC is updated daily.

The addition of ETOC to EBSCO Discovery Service means EDS customers have an added resource to augment the deep, broad indexing and the complexity of subjects already available from the vast and growing discovery service from EBSCO.

EBSCO Publishing President, Tim Collins, says EBSCO is the largest intermediary between publishers and libraries and as a result EBSCO Discovery Service is the most robust, inclusive service for discovering a library’s collection. “In terms of data components for EBSCO Discovery Service, we are focused on providing the most comprehensive coverage of the world’s content sources, and the most robust metadata for those sources. These two critical components allow for the broadest and deepest discovery of materials and the highest-quality relevant search results that our customers have come to expect from EBSCOhost®.” Collins continues, “The ETOC files gives EDS an even broader reach into important subject areas and further extends the value of EBSCO Discovery Service and its ability to facilitate full discovery of any library’s collection.”

About EDS
EBSCO Discovery Service creates a unified, customized index of an institution’s information resources, and an easy, yet powerful means of accessing all of that content from a single search box—searching made even more powerful because of the quality of metadata and depth and breadth of coverage.

EDS offers much deeper and wider indexing that any other discovery solution including full-text searching and fast, simple access to all of a library’s full-text content—both print and electronic. EDS uses the EBSCOhost® platform creating a single interface for discovery which leverages the powerful features of the most-used research platform—providing everything the researcher needs in one place.

About EBSCO Publishing
EBSCO Publishing is the world’s premier database aggregator, offering a suite of nearly 300 full-text and secondary research databases. Through a library of tens of thousands of full-text journals, magazines, books, monographs, reports and various other publication types from renowned publishers, EBSCO serves the content needs of all researchers (Academic, Medical, K-12, Public Library, Corporate, Government, etc.). The company’s product lines include proprietary databases such as Academic Search™, Business Source®, CINAHL®, DynaMed™, Literary Reference Center™, MasterFILE™, NoveList®, SocINDEX™ and SPORTDiscus™ as well as dozens of leading licensed databases such as ATLA Religion Database™, EconLit, INSPEC®, MEDLINE®, MLA International Bibliography, The Philosopher’s Index™, PsycARTICLES® and PsycINFO®. Databases are powered by EBSCOhost®, the most-used for-fee electronic resource in libraries around the world. EBSCO is the provider of EBSCO Discovery Service™ a core collection of locally-indexed metadata creating a unified index of an institution’s resources within a single, customizable search point providing everything the researcher needs in one place—fast, simple access to the library’s full text content, deeper indexing and more full-text searching of more journals and magazines than and other discovery service (www.ebscohost.com/discovery). For more information, visit the EBSCO Publishing Web site at: www.ebscohost.com, or contact: information@ebscohost.com.

EBSCO Publishing is a division of EBSCO Industries Inc., one of the largest privately held companies in the United States.
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For more information, please contact:
Kathleen McEvoy
Public Relations Manager
(800) 653-2726 ext. 2594
kmcevoy@ebscohost.com

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Norcross, GA — April 7, 2010
Washington County Public Library is the first known library in Kentucky to go live with Evergreen, the consortial, open-source library automation software. Equinox Software provided assistance with the migration and will continue to provide ongoing technical support.
The Washington County Public Library, located in Springfield, Kentucky, was built in 1966. With a collection that contains 22,886 bibliographic items, the library serves a community of just under 12,000 citizens from both their main branch and a bookmobile. To learn more about Washington County Library, please visit their website at: http://www.washingtonkylibrary.org/.

According to Joy Wandrey, Director of Washington County Public Library, “We are very pleased to be using Evergreen and have continuing support from Equinox. The folks at Equinox have been very helpful and very responsive to every question we have sent their way. Evergreen as a program is an easy to use and easy to understand program. We are excited to be a part of the open-source revolution.”

Equinox Software CEO, Brad LaJeunesse, says “We are thrilled to see Evergreen moving into another state. Joy and the rest of the staff at Washington County Public Library have been very enthusiastic about their move to Evergreen and the benefits of open source at their library.”

About Evergreen
Evergreen is a robust, open-source integrated library system best known for its unique ability to meet the needs of very large, high-transaction, multi-site consortia. However, it has also proven equally successful scaled down for the smallest libraries.
Since its debut in September 2006, the software has sustained the 270-plus libraries of the Georgia PINES consortium. Evergreen has earned acclaim and praise from users worldwide, including a Technology Collaboration Award from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Evergreen now supports over 500 libraries of every type-public, academic, special, and school media centers. Evergreen’s rapidly expanding community is now known to power live installations in 5 countries including 12 U.S. states and 4 Canadian provinces.
For more information about Evergreen, including a list of all known Evergreen installations, see http://evergreen-ils.org.

About Equinox Software, Inc.
Founded by the original Evergreen designers and developers, Equinox Software is a growing team of skilled professionals who provide services for Evergreen and Koha. These services include software development, consulting, legacy data migration, 24x7 technical support, and system hosting. Equinox also engages and supports a rapidly expanding open source community.

For more information on Equinox Software, please visit http://www.esilibrary.com.

Press contact: Corinne Hall, corinne@esilibrary.com, 678-269-6113
Evergreen and Koha are open source software, freely licensed under the GNU GPL. Evergreen and the Evergreen logo are trademarks of the Georgia Public Library Service.