Roger C. Schonfeld

Roger C. Schonfeld is the vice president of organizational strategy for ITHAKA and of Ithaka S+R’s libraries, scholarly communication, and museums program 

Roger and the team of Ithaka S+R’s methodological and subject matter experts that comprise the program conduct research and provide advisory services to drive evidence-based innovation and leadership to foster research, learning, and preservation. This has included extensive survey and qualitative research of faculty members and students, as well as leaders such as senior research officers, presidents and provosts, and the directors of libraries and museums. Additional leadership and policy projects have sought to bolster organizational strategy and leadership, diversity and community engagement, and collections management and preservation. The team provides strategic guidance and advisory services for software companies, publishers and other content providers, and academic libraries on the transformation of scholarly communications and the research workflow. Several additional areas of current emphasis include research data services, student basic needs, and higher education in prisons.  

Roger currently serves as a board member for the Center for Research Libraries opens in new tab/window. Previously, he has served on the NSF Blue Ribbon Task Force for Sustainable Digital Preservation and Access and NISO’s Open Discovery Initiative opens in new tab/window. Roger has testified before the US House of Representatives on government publishing, advocating for strong approaches to digital preservation.  

In addition to authoring dozens of research reports, articles, and briefing papers, Roger blogs regularly at the  Scholarly Kitchen opens in new tab/window and tweets at @rschon opens in new tab/window. With Deanna Marcum, he wrote Along Came Google: A History of Library Digitization opens in new tab/window (Princeton University Press, 2021), examining structural impediments to digital strategy and the role of an outside catalyst in fostering digitization among research libraries. He also wrote JSTOR: A History opens in new tab/window (Princeton, 2003), focusing on the development of a sustainable not-for-profit initiative for the digitization and preservation of scholarly texts.  

Roger was previously a research associate at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. There, he collaborated on The Game of Life: College Sports and Academic Values opens in new tab/window with James Shulman and William G. Bowen (Princeton, 2000). He was an Association of Research Libraries Leadership Fellow and received degrees in library and information science from Syracuse University and in English Literature from Yale University.