An Owie, again, from Ithaka

This morning's Inside Higher Education features and article by Kevin Guthrie, president of Ithaka and former president of JSTOR, entitled "Thinking Like an Entrepreneur." The article touts the behavior the title names, suggesting that online ventures from academia should follow the same basic models as as online ventures from, well, undergraduate students. From what I've seen, they certainly practice what they preach. This article is an example, a reminder to read the report they just published in spite of its length and my long reading list.

From my perspective, I had a slightly dog-eared moment where I heard, "Sustainability, funds . . . marketing . . . impact and value . . . marketing . . . planning marketing . . . flexibility and responsiveness . . . marketing." What they don't mention is that [in]flexibility within the academy (or government, in general) is challenging in itself. As a small department within a large university, our hands are frequently tied by regulations created and maintained by entities that regard multi-million dollar projects as typical, when our usual transactions run to the hundreds of dollars. It is the same mindset that shut out small restoration companies and housing providers after Katrina, when single contracts were given out for huge projects which rightly should have been regarded as many small projects which could have been more efficiently managed.

On that note, what does it indicated when access to current issues of the Journal of American History through the History Cooperative (a cooperative which the U of I Press is largely responsible for managing) is no longer available through the U of I Libraries? One has to use the (much more expensive) provider EBSCO. Ah, the economics of scale.