ITHAKA
 |
|
| Founded | 1995 |
|---|---|
| Founder | Andrew W. Mellon Foundation |
| Type | 501(c) |
| Location |
|
| Coordinates | 40°45′48″N 73°57′59″W / 40.76333°N 73.96639°WCoordinates: 40°45′48″N 73°57′59″W / 40.76333°N 73.96639°W |
| Products | JSTOR, Artstor |
|
Key people
|
|
|
Revenue
|
$58,388,918 |
| Endowment | $1,435,601 |
| Website | www.ithaka.org |
Ithaka Harbors, Inc. is a nonprofit organization whose stated mission is to "help the academic community use digital technologies to preserve the scholarly record and to advance research and teaching in sustainable ways". It is the parent company of digital library website JSTOR, the digital preservation service Portico, and the research and consulting group Ithaka S+R. It was launched by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
JSTOR was founded in 1995 under the direction of current ITHAKA president Kevin M. Guthrie. Guthrie also served as the founding president of ITHAKA in 2004. Both organizations were initially funded by grants from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The two organizations announced that they would merge in 2009 after years of working together closely. The organizations stated that the merger was "a natural progression" and that they would work together to help "academic institutions use digital technology to enhance scholarship and teaching and reduce system-wide costs through collective action."
Ithaka S+R is a research and consulting service that releases public research reports and offers consulting services to libraries, publishers, scholarly societies, universities, and other non-profit organizations. Ithaka S+R conducts triennial surveys of faculty members and library directors in the United States.
JSTOR is a major database of academic research materials, with content that includes books, journals, and primary sources.
Portico was created by JSTOR in 2002 as the Electronic-Archiving Initiative, but it was subsequently transferred to ITHAKA in 2004. Portico operates as a "'dim' archive for e-journal content" that stores information from scholarly journals so it can't be lost, an example being when the part of it housing the Graft: Organ and Cell Transplantation journal was "lit up" and became publicly accessible after access to that journal's website was removed by its publisher.
The same year that Ithaka Harbors obtained Portico, the Library of Congress gave a $3 million NDIIPP grant to the company for it to "develop, test, and operate one or more electronic archives for electronic journals", along with providing "long-term access to those journals". The endeavor was known as the Portico Project.
The National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services named Ithaka Harbors as one of the four recipients of their 2008 Digital Partnership grant awards. The company was chosen because of its Protecting Future Access Now: Developing a Prototype Preservation Model for Digital Books project, which is meant to be a "prototype preservation service that will provide a practical model for the preservation of digitized books."
...
Wikipedia