Ithaka:

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
  Smiths 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 JSTORs 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
Alukas 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
Alukas 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
Alukas 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
  Foundations program addressing archiving of
  journals combined with JSTORs 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 JSTORs 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-Archives
  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