• http://www.ithaka.org

Ithaka promotes innovation in higher education by helping pioneering initiatives to thrive. Leaders of new not-for-profit projects, and their funders, must navigate a challenging path from early-stage funding to long-term viability. At the same time, long-established institutions are finding that they must fundamentally rethink the way they serve their constituents in a changing world. Ithaka supports entrepreneurial leaders in higher education with a range of services.

Research Services
Our research group works to understand how new technologies are changing higher education and how colleges and universities can best manage these changes. Its work is guided by an advisory committee of community leaders, and it is presently emphasizing three areas of interest:

• Managing the Transition to an Electronic Environment and the Associated Preservation Imperative,
• Understanding the Evolving Needs and Practices of Faculty and Other End-Users, and
  
• New Models for Teaching and Learning.

Although most of our projects have relevance for smaller institutions as well as larger ones, one is focused exclusively on liberal arts colleges and their image use and provision for teaching and learning purposes.

Strategic Services
Our strategic services group provides strategic and business consulting services both to our affiliates and to other community members. Several projects have resulted in major reports to the community: an analysis of university publishing in the digital age, an examination of open source software for higher education, and a study of the evolving environment for scholarly monographs.

Shared Services
Ithaka provides a variety of shared services, including human resources, information technology, and finance, to strengthen organizational infrastructure and to enable projects to focus on core mission activities.

Incubated Entities
Ithaka incubates selected not-for-profit projects by providing them with resources and support to help them grow into sustainable and innovative enterprises. Our incubated entities benefit from strategic and research services, from the experiences of the affiliates and other incubated entities, and from access to a network of experienced leaders from the higher education, philanthropic, technology, and business sectors. We presently have three incubated entities:

• NITLE works to strengthen higher education by enabling the collaborative sharing of resources, expertise, and effective practices.
• Aluka is a not-for-profit international collaboration of educational and cultural institutions. Its mission is to build a high-quality scholarly resource of materials from and about Africa. It seeks to attract contributed collections about Africa from institutions and individuals around the world.
• Portico has created an electronic-archiving service to preserve scholarly literature published in electronic form and to ensure that these materials remain accessible to future scholars, researchers, and students.

Each of these organizations is actively contributing to the transition of higher education institutions to an environment in which cyberinfrastructure plays an ever-increasing role.

For more information, please see our website, http://www.ithaka.org.