Ithaka:  An Introduction

Kevin M. Guthrie

CNISpring Task Force Meeting

April 15, 2004

Background and Assumptions

• Information and information exchange are fundamental to the sharing of knowledge

• The creation, sharing and distribution of knowledge are the very core of research, teaching and scholarship

• Rapidly changing information technologies are having a potentially transformative impact on the scholarly enterprise and on higher education

• This period of change presents opportunities and challenges• Some of these opportunities will be addressed (and should be

addressed) by commercial ventures • Some will not be addressed by, to use Adam Smith’s phrase, “the

invisible hand” of the market

Entrepreneurship in the Not-for-Profit Higher Education Sector

• The not-for-profit sector is responsible for filling gaps not addressed by the free market

• In this time of rapid change, innovation is as critical in the not-for-profit sector as it is in the commercial world

• We believe one important contributor to innovation is the creation of new entrepreneurial organizations that take risks and create new services to address critical needs

• There is a need for additional mechanisms to stimulate innovative not-for-profit organizations addressing mission-critical needs in higher education

• Foundations make grants, but they are not set up to provide the full array of human, logistical and financial resources required to promote and maintain sustained initiatives.

Mission

• Ithaka has been founded to accelerate the creation, development and success of not-for-profit organizations focused on deploying new technologies for the benefit of higher education

• It brings together:– Financial resources from (initially) three foundations (Mellon, Hewlett,

Niarchos)– Relationships in all sectors and at all levels of the higher education

community – The experience derived from the creation of JSTOR, including a

conviction that organizations such as JSTOR can contribute enormous value to the scholarly community

Our Board of Trustees

• William G. Bowen (Chairman), President, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

• Kevin Guthrie, President, Ithaka• Paul Brest, President, The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation• Lynne Brindley, Chief Executive, British Library• Charles Exley, Former Chairman and Chief Executive, NCR Corp. • Kenneth Frazier, General Counsel, Merck• Mamphela Ramphele, Managing Director, World Bank• Larry Ricciardi, Former General Counsel, IBM• Charles Vest, President, MIT

1. Incubating promising and important projects and new ideas;2. Supporting affiliated organizations through sharing of

resources;3. Conducting research on the impact of advancing technologies

on the scholarly community;4. Providing strategic assistance and advice to other

organizations engaged in related activities.

Four areas of activity

Initial SupportingFoundations

Mellon FoundationHewlett Foundation

Niarchos Foundation

Adviso

ry

Servic

esIncubation

Councils

Research

Shared Services

Councils

JSTOR

ARTs

tor

E-Arc

hive

Aluka

Future

Projects

I T H A K A

Shared Services include:

•Information Technology

•Finance

•Human Resources

•Software Development

Facilitating Collaborative Relationships Among Affiliates

ARTstor and JSTOR:

– Working with JSTOR’s Library Relations group to benefit from existing relationships and reduce costs

– Sharing technological infrastructure for authentication and authorization

– Sharing a common infrastructure for reporting usage statistics

ARTstor

Update:

– Like JSTOR, bringing together content owners and educational users and working to balance their interests for the benefit of the scholarly community

– 300,000 images in coherent collections

– Software and tools to make effective use of the images

– www.artstor.org

Aluka

Aluka’s Mission

To build and support an online database of scholarly resources from various regions of the world, beginning in Africa

– For research and teaching at universities around the world

– For enhancing access to materials that are difficult to reach

– For preserving materials that are in danger of being lost

Aluka’s Core Values

• Coherently and strategically selected content

• Content that is important within the region

• Content that is important to the worldwide scholarly community

• The importance of aggregation (“weaving”)

• The importance of long-term sustainability

• Technical solutions that promote access worldwide

• High quality and reliability standards

Aluka’s First Three Content Areas

• Struggles for Freedom in Southern Africa– South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, Namibia, Botswana– Examples: anti-Apartheid periodicals, oral histories, personal

papers, historical photographs

• African Plants and Their Uses– Images of type specimens from herbaria in Africa, Europe, North

America– Traditional uses of plants

• Cultural Heritage Sites (under consideration)

Challenges

• Selecting wisely from enormous quantity of worthwhile content

• Observing intellectual property rights in countries without well developed practices

• Digitizing materials locally while maintaining consistent quality standards

• Appealing to a broad enough audience for Aluka to be sustainable – our goal is to become an indispensable resource in a range of fields

Electronic-ArchivingInitiative

The Electronic-Archiving Initiative

• Mission: To preserve scholarly literature published in electronic form and to ensure that these materials remain available to future generations of scholars, researchers, and students.

• The Electronic-Archiving Initiative, or “E-Archive”, was born out of the Mellon Foundation’s program addressing archiving of journals combined with JSTOR’s commitment to serve as a long-term archive of journal literature.

• JSTOR approaches this challenge with a system-wide perspective seeking to reduce costs and improve convenience for all participants in the scholarly communication cycle.

Background

• It is clear that archiving electronic resources will require a significant investment in the development of organizational and technological infrastructure.

• Maximum system-wide benefit from the investment in this infrastructure will be achieved by archiving a broad array of content. This extends well beyond JSTOR’s current collections scope and mission. A new entity is needed.

• E-Archive, now being incubated within Ithaka, is being developed to meet this need. E-Archive’s objective is to build the organizational and technological infrastructure necessary for the long-term preservation of electronic resources.

Five Areas of Activity

1. Define an archival service.

2. Develop a business model which ensures the short-, mid-, and long-term sustainability of the archive.

3. Design and build technological infrastructure.

4. Develop content processing protocols and tools.

5. Research the economic impact of electronic resources on operations costs for libraries and content producers.

Activities to Date

• Signed ten publishers to participate in pilot, developmental phase; analyzing sample e-journal data. Seeking publishers’ perspectives on the e-archiving challenge.

• Built a working prototype archive; production-level archive now in development Conducted a survey of faculty attitudes toward preservation of electronic resources.

• Developed tools to process and deposit sample content into the prototype archive. Creating verification and normalization procedures.

• With support from the Research group, designed and completed a study of libraries’ non-subscription costs for print vs. electronic periodicals.

• Developing a business model.

Ithaka:  An Introduction

Kevin M. Guthrie

CNIApril 15, 2004