As colleges and universities look for ways to deliver more online services to students and faculty, they also want the best performance from their IT investments. For many, that means moving to the cloud. Whether your goal is lower operating costs or better application performance, it’s still a good business decision. University of Maryland University […]

With increasing urgency, today’s colleges are being asked—by business, government and the nonprofit field—to impart so-called “21st century skills” of communication, collaboration, problem-solving and creativity to their students. What’s often missing from the list is leadership, which galvanizes these other skills and equips students to make informed decisions, take meaningful action, and develop pathways to […]

As highly visible institutions with perceived “deep pockets,” colleges and universities are targets for lawsuits arising from injuries and property damage only tenuously tied to the schools’ actions. The negligence of contractors, vendors, and professional service providers can and do land universities in court where they pay millions of dollars to defend and settle claims […]

All higher education institutions offer employee training and skill development in some form or another. Workshops. Webinars. Mentoring. Coaching. It’s the same-old same-old—but does it have to be? Some schools have observed identical practices for decades. But others believe professional development must constantly evolve, just like employee skills do. They are finding new ways to […]

To academic librarians, the serials crisis—the budget squeeze caused by the rising cost of subscriptions to scholarly journals—is old news. Library spending on serials rose 402 percent between 1986 and 2012, according to the Association of Research Libraries, and costs for individual subscriptions rose by an average of 12 percent over the past two years […]

Five years ago, a researcher in Kazakhstan frustrated at the inaccessibility and cost of so many scholarly journals launched Sci-Hub, a website that today provides quick, free access to 47 million articles, often by illegally bypassing paywalls. A recent article in Science found that in a single six-month period, Sci-Hub received requests for a staggering […]

American higher education is admired around the world, with its research universities leading the way in creating the breakthroughs that will lead to yet unimaginable futures, liberal arts colleges and state universities educating tomorrow’s leaders, and its community colleges providing retraining for middle aged displaced workers. However, across the full spectrum of higher education institutions […]

Like library administrators across the country, David Lewis of Indiana University-Purdue University Indianapolis is used to making hard choices. This year, he saved $200,000 by canceling dozens of subscriptions to scholarly science journals. In exchange, he began offering researchers on-request access to articles within hours, replacing the instant access they were accustomed to. He also […]