Dear friends and colleagues,

I am so grateful to be part of a community of people with a shared sense of purpose. Over the past few months, I have been traveling extensively and have met with many librarians, publishers, scholars, and administrators. Despite the uncertainty and critical challenges that surround much of our collective efforts right now, I’ve been struck by the resolve I’ve encountered. It’s easy to be overwhelmed, and yet I’ve found inspiration in people’s resilience and their creativity in continuing to pursue efforts to make knowledge and education more accessible and affordable.

At ITHAKA, we are working in this same spirit to support the day-to-day work you do to nurture new ideas and research, to bring content online, to lower barriers to access, to introduce and use new technologies, and to preserve knowledge and materials for the future. We continue to try to do this in ways that are meaningful and lasting for your organizations, and that bring our community together. As a purpose-driven nonprofit, we focus on providing affordable, sustainable solutions to shared challenges. We have a long history of doing this successfully through JSTOR, Portico, and Ithaka S+R, and we recognize that our ability to rally together as a community to meet collective needs is all the more critical when our institutions are under increased pressures.

Among our many areas of work, three stand out as benefiting from this type of collective engagement for our library and publishing communities. I want to draw your attention to them here and to encourage you to consider participating with us.

Charting the future of digital stewardship

Since our founding 30 years ago, we’ve been helping libraries and publishers share and preserve knowledge. Through conversations with over 120 library leaders around the world, we understand that libraries and archives face a daunting challenge: digital collections are growing quickly, but the capacity to process and describe them has not kept pace. This is not for lack of will, but because the task is simply too large for current systems and workflows. The unfortunate result is that this growing body of materials—content that is unique and valuable for scholarship and teaching—is invisible and at risk of obsolescence in today’s research and learning environments.

To address this issue, we’ve worked with the community to build JSTOR Digital Stewardship Services, a next generation digital asset management solution to help libraries and archives describe, preserve, manage, and share their unique collections at scale. Libraries can take advantage of our robust DAM to manage digital assets—including preserving them through Portico and providing access on JSTOR—and as charter participants, can help shape the future of JSTOR Seeklight, a first-of-its-kind AI-assisted collection processing tool that accelerates metadata creation and collection descriptions while maintaining expert oversight. We just announced JSTOR Stewardship last month, and already we’ve seen participation from a wide spectrum of institutions from large research universities to small think tanks. I hope you’ll choose to learn more at the links provided here, reach out to Roger Schonfeld, who leads this work for ITHAKA, or contact your JSTOR Outreach representative.

Defining an approach to AI literacy

Increasingly librarians and faculty members are being asked to help build AI literacy among students, but best practices for doing so are yet to emerge and the landscape changes daily. We’re bringing people together to develop a shared approach and community of practice. Nearly 50 institutions are participating in our Ithaka S+R AI literacy cohort project to define AI literacy learning outcomes and how they can be effectively achieved through integration into the curriculum. We are excited to facilitate this work and are planning additional cohorts for this project given the pressing need for shared insights and structured guidance on this topic. Please reach out to Dylan Ruediger who heads this research program if you’d like to learn more, or follow our work at Generative AI and Higher Education.

Creating pathways for diverse, open access scholarship

It seems especially important now to ensure we foster a robust, diverse publishing ecosystem that brings to light new research from a wide-range of perspectives and disciplines to fuel insight and knowledge creation. Among the many ways JSTOR invests in making content openly accessible, is Path to Open, a multi-year pilot program designed to increase access to scholarly monographs, with a special emphasis on working with university presses to develop a sustainable open access model. Nearly 250 libraries and 50 university presses are already engaged in this effort that will publish more than 1,000 new open access books. We are eager for even greater community participation—and want to share the story of one university, who shares perspectives on the benefits of the program for the library, its press, and authors. If successful, Path to Open promises to be a viable, sustainable community-supported initiative that, at scale, will have a transformative impact on access to high quality scholarship in the humanities and social sciences. Reach out to program lead John Lenahan or your JSTOR Outreach representative to get involved.

Your consideration of and engagement with these efforts is so important and valued. From my perspective, all three of these initiatives provide a powerful opportunity to position values-aligned library and publishing organizations for the future and to improve research, publishing, preservation, and learning in ways that are thoughtful and sustainable. Making progress in this way is so important, particularly right now. I hope you will connect with us to explore how being part of these efforts can advance your goals and those of our shared community.

Sincerely,

Kevin Guthrie
President, ITHAKA