6-23-23
By Katina Strauch and Leah Hinds
I think we would all agree that Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online (SUCHO) is an extraordinary initiative to safeguard the digital cultural heritage of Ukraine with the ongoing Russian invasion. Anna Kijas (Tufts University, US), Quinn Dombrowski (Stanford University, US) and Sebastian Majstorovic (European University Institute, Italy) launched the initiative on 1 March 2022. SUCHO has quickly garnered the support of approximately 1,000 volunteers within the first week of its launch. Unlike other rapid-response projects, SUCHO stands out due to its remarkable scale and scope. When held in Italy, the Fiesole Retreats have frequently been held at the EUI, a charming and elegant venue! | eui.eu
ATGthePodcast 163 – SUCHO: Saving Ukrainian Cultural Heritage Online
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Hooray! Jane Bunker, director of the Cornell University Press, has stepped into the presidency of the Association of University Presses. Bunker succeeded 2022-2023 President Charles Watkinson, director of the University of Michigan Press and associate university librarian for publishing at Michigan, at the conclusion of the Association’s 2023 Virtual Annual Meeting last week.
Other AUPresses leaders, elected at the Association’s virtual Annual Business Meeting on May 18, have also begun their terms:
- Anthony Cond, director of Liverpool University Press, has been named President-Elect.
- Alexandria Leonard, senior operations analyst at Princeton University Press, has become Treasurer. She succeeds Mike W. Bieker—director of the University of Arkansas Press and assistant vice chancellor, director of operations and finance, in the university’s Division of Research and Innovation—who will continue to serve on the Board for one more year as a member-at-large.
- Teresa Collins, deputy director at the University Press of Kentucky, joins the Board as Treasurer-elect.
- Angela Anderson, director of the Marine Corps University Press; Taralee Cyphers, assistant director at the Ohio State University Press; and John Sherer, Spangler Family Director of the University of North Carolina Press, began three-year terms as Board members-at-large.
Bunker is the Association’s 73rd President (see a complete list of past Presidents) and directs Cornell University Press, a founding member of the Association. She began her career at SUNY Press—serving as acquisitions editor, editor-in-chief, and associate director—and held the post of director at Northwestern University Press for a decade prior to coming to Cornell in 2020. She holds a MA in philosophy from Fordham University and a BA in philosophy from St. Norbert College. She has served as a member of Cornell’s Committee on the Future of Scholarly Communications and the Governing Cabinet for Project Euclid, and as Principal Investigator on grants exploring new open access initiatives from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.
A former member of the Association’s Board of Directors (2013-2016), Bunker has also chaired its Professional Development and Library Relations Committees, and served on its Nominating Committee, Annual Meeting Program Committee (twice), and Small Press Task Force.
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Matthew, Leah and Katina want to bring something good to your attention. Simon Linacre’s Briefing on predatory publishing (the Predatory Effect: understanding the past, present and future of deceptive academic journals) now has an Altmetric Score of 101 and has been cited five times in the publishing literature. As far as we can tell, this means that the book has over 100 mentions in social media and this indicates a level of engagement beyond only academic sources. It’s certainly the most successful briefing thus far (the briefing on AI in scholarly publishing has an Altmetric score of 39, for instance). For some reason there is no Altmetric meter on the Preprints briefing.) For an article, we believe that 20 is a pretty good Altmetric score. Many thanks to Anthony Watkinson for working with Simon on this Briefing.
Huge kudos to Matthew Ismail who conceived of the Briefings several yeas ago!
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ITHAKA has recently announced a new set of services to help academic, research, and cultural institutions easily and affordably share, preserve, and manage their local digital collections. These are emerging new areas of study and research. “Research and learning increasingly take place online, so institutions need solutions that align their local collections to digital workflows, are interoperable with a variety of tools, and are actively preserved as technology advances,” said Bruce Heterick, VP, Open Collections & Infrastructure at ITHAKA. “We created JSTOR and Portico to do exactly this for more than 100,000 journals and books held by libraries, and are excited to extend the use of this infrastructure to help institutions get their local digital collections more effectively into existing research and teaching workflows affordably, efficiently, and at scale.”
Following a successful series of pilots during which over 300 institutions shared more than 1,800 collections on JSTOR, and a cohort of 40 partners helped to define preservation and collection loading needs, ITHAKA developed three services to support institutions of all sizes looking for high-impact, sustainable solutions. Institutions can now:
- Share collections on JSTOR, making it possible for millions of users to discover and use content alongside a rich trove of journals, books, images, and other primary source collections while bringing greater visibility to institutions.
- Preserve collections with Portico to safeguard the accessibility and usability of digital files in the long term, addressing the needs of tomorrow’s scholars.
- Manage collections using JSTOR Forum, a web-based tool that makes it easy to catalog, edit metadata, and publish to JSTOR and other sites – all in one place.
With more than 14,000 institutions participating in JSTOR worldwide, ITHAKA is excited by the potential impact of the new services. Southwestern University was among the first to sign on to the new offering. During the pilot, they saw early success from their materials being on the JSTOR platform when a collection of aerial photographs received 1,980 total item requests in the first few days after its launch.
“The aerials were such a nice collection to use for the beta because they had been scanned for a long time. Previously, the only way people could use them was to come here to the reading room and access them online,” said Megan Firestone, Head of Special Collections and Archives, Southwestern University. “Using the collection loader, we were able to put them on JSTOR and the community has been very receptive to being able to see these images without a trip to the Special Collections & Archives.”
Southwestern’s experience was not unique. Throughout the pilot, the average item requests per collection on JSTOR increased 30% yearly. In the first weeks since formally announcing the new services to pilot participants, nearly a third have signed on to one or more of the services. Overall, collections contributed during the pilot were accessed 1.4 million times by users from more than 10,300 institutions worldwide.
Asked about the decision to continue with the paid service, Firestone added, “We can show usage stats, what we were able to upload, how it aligns with our workflow, and the fact that this allows the students to access the materials more easily and efficiently. With this tool, we can use the data and connect it all back to the students, and that really makes the case for funding.”
Institutions can use the full set of infrastructure services or pick and choose based on their needs. Service fees are scaled using Carnegie Classifications starting at $1,200 per year, with an option for ITHAKA to regularly harvest collections from repositories like CONTENTdm, Digital Commons, Islandora, Internet Archive, DSpace, Omeka, Preservica, LUNA, and Alma Digital for an additional $1,000.
Making the services affordable and sustainable is part of ITHAKA’s nonprofit mission. The fee models for these services were developed with extensive input from pilot participants and align with ITHAKA’s ongoing efforts to balance cost recovery and product sustainability with affordability for institutions.
The library community will have an opportunity to learn more about ITHAKA’s infrastructure services and other important initiatives at booth #4834 during the American Library Association’s (ALA) 2023 annual conference in Chicago on June 22-27. All others can request more information online at about.jstor.org/advance.
heidi.mcgregor@ithaka.org
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