On Thursday, April 2, Christine Wolff-Eisenberg and Jennifer Fredrick of Ithaka S+R launched the project briefing of our CNI Spring 2020 Virtual Meeting with a report on the key findings of their 2019 survey of academic library leadership; this is part of an almost decade-long series of such surveys that Ithaka has often been very gracious to releasing at CNI meetings. We should have the video of this presentation available in the near future and will announce it here. In the interim, the full report is at
https://sr.ithaka.org/publications/ithaka-sr-us-library-survey-2019/
and their slides from the presentation are at
There are a couple of important developments here. The data being reported is from late 2019; clearly we are in a different world today, as our presenters emphasized, and while this is a very important “before” dataset, the answers might be very different today. Ithaka is going to do a follow-on survey in fall of 2020, and the comparison between the before and after data should be incredibly important. More details on this to come. While everything is very fluid right now, I’m hopeful we might be able to share some results from this wok at our December member meeting, which I hope we can conduct (at least mainly) in person.
Also, Ithaka is reaching out to do a student survey in the wake of the pandemic. See
https://sr.ithaka.org/our-work/covid-19-student-survey-faqs/
An excerpt:
In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, colleges and universities across the country are grappling with many challenges, including moving instruction online, ensuring that students are supported holistically, and beginning to forecast retention. To provide the real-time information needed by institutional leaders, Ithaka S+R is launching a new survey of students to enable institutions to swiftly address these crucial issues.
To help institutions streamline participation, we are able to cover the costs of the survey for 20 institutions. And, because institutional leaders need this vital information as soon as possible, we are prepared to begin survey fieldwork as early as next week.
The Ithaka S+R COVID-19 Student Survey builds on our extensive work surveying campus communities, including national and institution-specific surveys of faculty members and students.
If you are interested in fielding this survey in April, please review the survey instrument and learn more about survey implementation steps. If you are committed to moving forward, you can sign up to participate. We are sensitive to the many challenges you may be facing at this juncture and have tried to reduce the administrative work to participate in this survey as much as possible. This includes waiving the fee for 20 institutions, a click-through participation agreement, a simplified implementation process, and templates for the invitation and reminder emails for inviting your students. If demand for the survey exceeds 20 institutions, the fee for additional four-year colleges and universities will be $4,000 to help defray staff and infrastructure costs.
Clifford Lynch
Director, CNI
