Broadening our work to serve the mission: JSTOR Labs is now ITHAKA Labs

As JSTOR Labs, our team always centered on ITHAKA’s mission to expand access to knowledge and education, with a focus on knowledge. Our work and ambitions have grown over time to encompass expanding access to education in meaningful ways, and today, I am pleased to announce we have a name to match: we will now be known as ITHAKA Labs. 

This expansion of our scope in service of ITHAKA’s mission has come about through a long and iterative process. 

We learned quickly after launching this JSTOR Labs team a dozen years ago that our success required properly calibrating our ambition. To have the change-catalyzing impact we sought, we needed precisely the right kind, and right amount of ambition. If we set our ambition dial too high, as a small team we might not be able to take the incremental steps to bring that future into being: our reach would exceed our grasp. If we set the ambition dial too low, we’d end up getting bogged down in the minutiae of current systems, or describing something that was just the current solution with a pretty bow on it. When we had our greatest successes, like, say, Text Analyzer, we reimagined existing research workflows and resources, while also providing tools that were immediately useful to real students and teachers.

Small successes led to more, larger successes. This is the case both within a single project, where time and again we have achieved a valuable solution not in one big “eureka” moment, but through dozens, or even hundreds of tiny, incremental improvements. It is also the case across the program of the Labs team. Our small team showed we could develop research tools like the JSTOR Understanding Series that delighted researchers. Our most exciting projects were accomplished with partners willing to explore and develop alongside us, like the Folger Shakespeare Library, Columbia University Libraries, and the University of Washington DataLab. That success led to philanthropic funding from the Mellon Foundation, Bank of America Foundation, and others that enabled us to grow and to tackle even bigger challenges, such our work with Dumbarton Oaks to develop the Plant Humanities Lab and Juncture, or our work with the Kunhardt Film Foundation to build Interview Archive. 

Over the years, as the features and tools we developed proved useful, we began to tackle larger sized problems, the solutions to which were not just new features, but new products and services like JSTOR Access in Prison and Constellate. 

Then finally, working closely with our researcher colleagues in Ithaka S+R, we further widened our scope to look beyond the world of libraries, publishers and researchers – the world of JSTOR – to look at the entire higher education ecosystem. We did this when we worked with Ithaka S+R and a cohort of innovative academic societies to imagine the Future of Annual Meetings and Scholarly Societies. More recently, building on the work Ithaka S+R pioneered with City University of New York, we have incubated a new service, Transfer Explorer, that helps students and those who support them understand how past coursework and other learning experiences transfer and count toward a college degree. Each of these incubations benefited from more philanthropic support, from Ascendium Education Group, the Gates Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, the ECMC Foundation and others, allowing us to increase the scale of our ambition for these projects.

In recognition of tour growing ambition to serve the broader mission, we are taking on the new identity of ITHAKA Labs. We have the same values, collaborative spirit, and experimental mindset we always have. Now we are applying our approach on a broader set of challenges facing higher education. 

Welcome to our new website. Stay awhile, poke around, learn alongside us. If an idea strikes or you know of a problem facing higher education that could use creative and concerted attention, let us know. We’re looking forward to the next dozen years of continuing to grow our ambition, with you.