Dear friends and colleagues,

At ITHAKA, we have consistently embraced and made thoughtful, responsible, productive use of new technologies that have the power to improve access to education and knowledge for people. It’s never innovation for its own sake. When new technologies emerge, we evaluate them through learning and experimentation, looking for how they can support our nonprofit mission.

It started in the mid-1990s, when the advent of high-quality digital scanning, OCR technology, and the internet made it possible for paper-based collections to be converted to digital content that could be accessed all over the world. JSTOR was founded to use these technologies to help colleges and universities move library collections from physical buildings to servers, vastly reducing the cost of storage and making them far more widely available.

I’m proud of this aspect of our work across ITHAKA’s services. In the past year, we put technology to work to help students, researchers, librarians, and archivists overcome persistent challenges that preclude access to education and knowledge:

  • Transfer Explorer, a resource jointly created by our Ithaka S+R and Labs teams, and powered by deep connections with school data and ample processing power, helps students to discover credit transfer pathways, saving them time and money. This resource is being used with early adopter institutions in Connecticut, South Carolina, and Washington.
  • A Portico-led news preservation pilot aims to provide a cost-effective approach to archive content from digital news outlets that might otherwise be lost over time and ensure access for future researchers. The pilot includes outlets such as the Columbia Missourian, Newsberg, and Black by God, with preservation agreements covering 34 newspapers and expertise across two major digital news platforms: BLOX and WordPress.
  • JSTOR Seeklight, the AI-powered collections processing tool within JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services, allows practitioners to reduce backlogs and improve access through accelerated processing of distinctive collections. The libraries and archives of over 40 colleges, universities, and other institutions are using JSTOR Seeklight and contributing to its development.

Each of these efforts has advanced thoughtfully through engagement with those most closely impacted by the work.

In 2026, we’ll use technology once again to help tackle one of the most pressing challenges facing colleges and universities: ensuring that digital educational resources are accessible to everyone. In the U.S., this includes meeting ADA Title II requirements. For many institutions, this is a daunting financial and operational task for which they are currently underprepared. We are ready to help and are eager to do so as this work so clearly advances our mission.

Our JSTOR team recently updated our Accessibility at JSTOR webpage to share our approach. In addition to supporting existing accessibility workflows for users, you’ll see we are supporting an accessible-first approach for new content and building a tool to further improve accessibility of content on-demand as users request it. In parallel, we are developing JSTOR Seeklight to improve the accessibility of distinctive collections, starting with text recognition and transcription and with an alt-text generator coming next as we explore a number of other promising directions as well. As ever, our approach will be mission- and community-centered, and we invite you to reach out with any questions you may have as this work progresses.

We know we are not alone in working to harness technology for the better. If you have ideas to share or things you are doing or learning that might help us, please reach out. We do our best work when we work together.

Sincerely,

Kevin Guthrie
President, ITHAKA