Ithaka: An Introduction

1. Ithaka:  An Introduction Kevin M. Guthrie CNI Spring Task Force Meeting April 15, 2004

2. 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

3. 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.

4. 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

5. 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

6. Four areas of activity • Incubating promising and important projects and new ideas; • Supporting affiliated organizations through sharing of resources; • Conducting research on the impact of advancing technologies on the scholarly community; • Providing strategic assistance and advice to other organizations engaged in related activities.

7. Shared Services include: • Information Technology • Finance • Human Resources • Software Development

8. 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

9. 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

10. Aluka

11. 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

12. 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

13. 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)

14. 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

15. Electronic-ArchivingInitiative

16. 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.

17. 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.

18. Five Areas of Activity • Define an archival service. • Develop a business model which ensures the short-, mid-, and long-term sustainability of the archive. • Design and build technological infrastructure. • Develop content processing protocols and tools. • Research the economic impact of electronic resources on operations costs for libraries and content producers.

19. 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.

20. Ithaka:  An Introduction Kevin M. Guthrie CNI April 15, 2004