Summary of Findings
Managing Academic Digital Resources is Not Easy
Schools clearly face difficulties in the management and distribution of digital resources. A significant majority of survey respondents (63%) indicated that they find this process challenging. The most commonly cited challenge by far was a lack of integration between systems and workflows (86%), followed by security issues (57%) and time-management issues (55%).
Processes Vary
Different schools – even different departments – manage and distribute digital resources in very different ways. Institutions are about evenly split between handling these processes manually (26%), via a third-party solution (29%), and via a solution developed in-house (28%). No method of managing and distributing resources has been universally accepted as best practice across the education industry yet.
Roles Vary
Similar to the above, there’s no universal rule regarding who should be responsible for selecting and procuring digital resources at academic institutions. Faculty maintain a great deal of control over what resources are used in their courses, but so do course designers and IT staff. While central IT and procurement teams are most often responsible for managing these resources, 25% of respondents answered this question with “Other” and identified alternatives ranging from library and bookstore staff to specialized technology committees.
"Shadow IT, decentralized licensing and distribution models, in-house systems, and manual workarounds have compounded the challenges that IT faces when managing digital resources. Quite simply, they don’t know what they don’t know. It is not uncommon for an academic institution to have varying models for purchasing and distribution, nor is it uncommon for these processes to live on different campuses or even within different departments, making it impossible to have visibility across all channels in one central place.”
Ryan Peatt,
CPO at Kivuto Solutions