NYSHEI News

Plan to join us for an informative meeting and network with academic library colleagues from across the state.

Keynote speaker is New York State Librarian Bernard Margolis, who will share his vision for New York’s libraries. Learn about NYSHEI advocacy efforts on behalf of New York’s academic libraries. Hear from state policy makers on our economic climate, higher education and research innovation. Come a day early and join the NYSHEI Board for a day of academic library advocacy at the Capitol.

To encourage broad participation, there will be no registration fee for this year’s meeting!

Save the Date!

What: NYSHEI Annual Meeting

When: June 9, 2009, 10:00 a.m. – 3:00 p.m.

Where: University at Albany, Science Library – Standish Room

NYSHEI congratulates Trudi E. Jacobson, winner of the Association of College & Research Libraries’ 2009 Miriam Dudley Instruction Librarian Award.  Ms Jacobson holds the rank of Librarian and heads the UA Libraries User Education Program.

The Miriam Dudley Award was first bestowed in 1984, making Trudi Jacobson the 25th recipient of this prestigious honor. The Miriam Dudley Award recognizes librarians who have made especially significant contributions to the advancement of instruction in a college or research library environment.

The award honors Miriam Dudley, whose pioneering efforts in the field of bibliographic instruction led to the formation of the ACRL Instruction Section (formerly ACRL Bibliographic Instruction Section). The Miriam Dudley Award is administered by the Instruction Section of ACRL.

Trudi Jacobson will be honored by ACRL during the ALA Annual Conference scheduled for Chicago, Illinois this July.  In addition to the ceremonies associated with the award, Ms Jacobson will receive a prize of $1000.  Elsevier is the underwriter of the Miriam Dudley Instruction Librarian Award.
To secure the Dudley Award, nominees should have achieved distinction in one or more of the following areas:

Planning and implementation of an academic instruction program in a library environment that has served as a model for other programs nationally or regionally

Production of a body of research and publication that has a demonstrable impact on the concepts and methods of teaching and information-seeking strategies in a college or research institution

Sustained participation in organizations, at the regional or national level, devoted to the promotion and enhancement of academic instruction in a library environment

Promotion, development, and integration of education for instruction in ALA accredited library schools or professional continuing education programs that have served as models for other courses and programs

“Trudi E. Jacobson has distinguished herself as an extraordinary librarian, instructor, and scholar.  She is an asset to the UA Libraries in every sense.  Her significant contributions to the Libraries, the University, the SUNY system, and her profession, underscore why she was selected for this notable ACRL award. It’s with great pleasure that I share this exceptionally good news with the UA and SUNY Library communities,” said University at Albany Dean and Director of Libraries, Frank D’Andraia.

Previous Miriam Dudley Instruction Librarian Award Recipients:

2008 – Craig Gibson
2007 – Debra L. Gilchrist
2006 – Mary Jane Petrowski
2005 – Ilene F. Rockman
2004 – William Miller
2003 – Loanne Snavely
2002 – Randy Hensley
2001 – Patricia Iannuzzi
2000 – Carol Collier Kuhlthau
1999 – Mary Reichel
1998 – Lori Arp
1997 – Patricia Senn Breivik
1996 – Barbara A. MacAdam
1995 – Lizabeth (Betsy) Wilson
1994 – Cerise Oberman
1993 – Hannelore Rader
1992 – Betsy Baker
1991 – Carla Stoffle
1990 – Joan Ormondroyd
1989 – Maureen Pastine
1988 – Sharon Hogan
1987 – Evan Ira Farber
1986 – Virginia Tiefel
1985 – Carolyn Kirkendall
1984 – Thomas Kirk

The following is the text of an email announcement I received from Ken DiFiore of Portico.  The full news release is included.

As NYSHEI is a valued partner of Portico, I am writing to make you aware of an important organizational development.  Recently Ithaka, the organizational home of Portico, was merged with JSTOR, a related organization.

As you may know, Ithaka was started by JSTOR’s founding president, Kevin Guthrie, and we have closely collaborated with JSTOR since Ithaka’s founding.  You may also be aware that Portico grew out of what was known as the Electronic Archiving Initiative of JSTOR and, in addition to our shared commitment to preservation, we already share various resources and services with JSTOR.

The formal announcement about the merger and the rationale is attached, and I would also be glad to talk with you about it should you have questions.

Please be assured that this change will not impact your relationship with Portico.  The people you work with and the service we provide will continue as you expect.  In the future, however, we expect good things to come from closer collaboration with our colleagues, and we will keep you apprised as these develop.

FULL RELEASE

JSTOR and Ithaka Merge, Uniting Efforts to Serve the Scholarly Community

JSTOR and Ithaka today announced the merger of their organizations. This move unites two pioneering entities that are focused on helping the scholarly community take advantage of rapidly advancing information technologies.

JSTOR was founded in 1995 by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation as a shared digital library to help academic institutions save costs associated with the storage of library materials and to vastly improve access to scholarship. Today, more than 5,200 academic institutions and 600 scholarly publishers and content owners participate in JSTOR. Ithaka was started in 2003 by Kevin Guthrie, the original founder of JSTOR, with funding from the Mellon Foundation as well as The William and Flora Hewlett Foundation and Stavros S. Niarchos Foundation. Ithaka was established to aid promising not-for-profit digital initiatives and to provide research and insight on important strategic issues facing the academic community. Ithaka has become known for its influential reports including the 2007 University Publishing in A Digital Age and the 2008 Sustainability and Revenue Models for Online Academic Resources. It is the organizational home to Portico, a digital preservation service, and NITLE, a suite of services supporting the use of technology in liberal arts education.

The new combined enterprise will be called Ithaka and will be dedicated to helping the academic community use digital technologies to advance scholarship and teaching and to reducing system-wide costs through collective action.

This is a natural step for these organizations. JSTOR and Ithaka already work closely together, sharing a common history, values, and fundamental purpose. During 2008, the Ithaka-incubated resource Aluka was integrated into JSTOR as an initial step, further strengthening ties between the organizations. JSTOR will now join Portico and NITLE as a coordinated set of offerings made available under the Ithaka organizational name.

As one organization, Ithaka will explore how to use its combined knowledge and experience to help its constituents in new ways. “The academic community has invested significantly in the important set of services that we manage and, together, they represent core elements of the networked digital infrastructure needed to support scholarship, research, and teaching. Increasingly we are approached for help on a range of initiatives that seek to leverage this investment and that we think will benefit from stronger coordination across all our areas of expertise and activity,” said Guthrie. “We are very excited about the potential to work with our constituents in even more useful innovative ways through this combination.”

The organization will also remain steadfastly committed to enabling institutions to maximize the benefits they provide to scholars and students while containing expenses. Michael Spinella, Executive Director of JSTOR and now Executive Vice President of Ithaka added, “JSTOR and Ithaka have a history of helping academic institutions by building and managing collectively-supported large-scale resources with an aim of developing sustainable models that deliver greater value than institutions could achieve alone. Now is the time when we can work even more closely together to develop and sustain the kinds of shared solutions that will be vital to the success of educational institutions in the future.”

In addition to JSTOR, Portico, and NITLE, Ithaka’s existing research and strategic services groups will remain important parts of the enterprise. The board will be comprised of Ithaka and JSTOR Trustees, with Henry Bienen, President of Northwestern University, serving as Chairman and Paul Brest, President of the Hewlett Foundation as Vice Chairman.

About JSTOR

JSTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to helping the scholarly community discover, use, and build upon a wide range of intellectual content in a trusted digital archive. The JSTOR archive includes over 800 leading academic journals across the humanities, social sciences, and sciences, as well as conference proceedings, transactions, select monographs and other materials valuable for academic work. More than 5,200 academic and other institutions in 143 countries and over 600 learned societies, university presses, cultural heritage, and other content contributors participate in JSTOR. Since the public launch of the archive, over 750 million articles and other items have been accessed by researchers and students throughout the world.

About Ithaka

Ithaka is an independent not-for-profit organization with a mission to accelerate the productive uses of information technologies for the benefit of higher education worldwide. Ithaka provides research, strategic, and administrative services to promising not-for-profit projects, helping them to develop sustainable organizational and business models. It also works with established institutions that are rethinking the way they serve their core constituents. Ithaka includes Portico a digital preservation archive to which more than 8,200 e-journals and 4,600 e-books are committed, and NITLE, a suite of services supporting the innovative use of technology in liberal arts education.

For further information, please contact:

Heidi McGregor

Director, Marketing & Communications

heidi.mcgregor@ithaka.org

Embarrassing news from our state capital is hardly news at all.  Whether it has been the well documented ethical and proceedural problems, the all-too-frequent criminal charges, or the simply inappropriate use of state dollars and extravagence of pork-barrel spending, New York State government never fails to disappoint hardened cynics.

Recent articles in the Albany Times Union and the New York Daily News should help you keep up on the latest round of regretful and, perhaps, criminal activities in Albany.  This article from the Buffalo News does a nice job of recounting the past twelve months.

NYSHEI Executive Director Jason Kramer provided written and oral testimony to the New York State Legislative Joint Fiscal Committee during the hearing on the Higher Education portion of Governor Paterson’s budget proposal.

Mr. Kramer warned the Senators and Assembly members of the committee to be mindful of the importance of academic and research libraries to the quality of higher education but also to their role in the development of an innovation economy.

The written testimony, available here, stressed the need for the Academic Information Research Access (ARIA) Act and spoke of the significant return on investment of this bold private-public collaboration that would improve research, assist stressed library budgets, and spur economic growth.

In his oral testimony Mr. Kramer echoed the importance of ARIA, while also calling on lawmakers to support and restore existing library funding, particularly coordinated collection development (CCDA) funding.