Videos from ITHAKA Sustainable Scholarship 2012 are now available! Click the links below.

The Question of Quality: New Forms of Grading, Credentialing, and Peer Review in the Digital World

The higher education community is embracing digital technologies and finds itself at a crossroads. As scholarly work, research, and teaching evolve, traditional methods of assessing quality are being challenged through new forms of grading, credentialing, evaluation, and peer review. ITHAKA Sustainable Scholarship 2012 will bring together innovators in this sphere to discuss the impact of these technologies and networks on scholarly practices and notions of quality in the academy.

ITHAKA Sustainable Scholarship is an invitation only conference that connects leaders and innovators in publishing, academia, technology, preservation, and information sciences for crossover inspiration and dialog. Sustainable Scholarship is hosted by ITHAKA, a not-for-profit organization that helps the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways. ITHAKA provides three innovative services that benefit the academic community: Ithaka S+R, JSTOR, and Portico.

Session Videos

Welcome and Keynote Address
Kevin Guthrie, President, ITHAKA

Next Gen Peer Review
Peter Binfield, Co-founder and Publisher, PeerJ
Kathleen Fitzpatrick, Director of Scholarly Communication, Modern Language Association

Credentialing: Diploma, Certificate, or Badge?
Sandra L. Cook, System Director for Distance Learning/KCTCS Online, Kentucky Community & Technical College System
Sheryl Grant, Director of Social Networking, HASTAC/MacArthur Foundation Digital Media & Learning Competition
Dale Stephens, Chief Executive Deviant, UnCollege

Online Learning
Larry Bacow, former President of Tufts University
Douglas H. Fisher, Associate Professor of Computer Science, Vanderbilt University
Daphne Koller, Rajeev Motwani Professor in the Computer Science Department at Stanford University and Co-founder, Coursera
Kirstin Celeste Early, Student, Vanderbilt University

Closing Panel: Reflections and Impact
Clifford A. Lynch, Executive Director, Coalition of Networked Information
Linda Downs, Executive Director, College Art Association
Alison Mudditt, Director, University of California Press
Brian E. C. Schottlaender, The Audrey Geisel University Librarian at the University of California, San Diego

On September 27th, ITHAKA held several sessions focusing on exciting new developments taking place throughout the organization at JSTOR, Portico, and Ithaka S+R. Kevin Guthrie, President of ITHAKA, set the stage for the Sustainable Scholarship Conference 2010 and gave an overview of the goals of this event. Morning and afternoon sessions addressed new developments in content and service offerings, preservation and research.

How do students and scholars find the content they need and what steps are publishers, libraries, programmers, and others taking to help them? Discovering Scholarly Content addresses "Discovery" from a variety of perspectives, offering both big-picture thinking and concrete illustration of particular tactics for making scholarly content more discoverable. Topics discussed include: How are students and scholars finding the information they need today? What can publishers and other content holders do to improve the discoverability of their content, not just to search engines, but to keep users there once they arrive? What steps can or should be taken by content holders themselves, and which are best done by others, on a larger scale? And what role are libraries playing, and are they going to play, in this area?

Keynote speaker Daniel Russell, Senior Research Scientist for Search Quality & User Happiness at Google, opened the day by sharing his research on understanding user research behaviors and how various factors can dramatically impact users' success and satisfaction.

Sessions throughout the day explored Discovery from different vantage points: the publishers who seek to add value to their content, and keep users on their sites; the libraries who must contend with rapidly shifting research practices of their patrons; the software developers who are designing creative ways to take data - about a variety of usage patterns - and turn them into meaningful signals for readers who seek content most relevant to their work.