Ithaka is an independent not-for-profit organization with a mission to help accelerate the adoption of productive and efficient uses of information technologies for the benefit of the worldwide higher education community. Its initial focus is on helping promising not-for-profit projects develop sustainable organizational and business models. Ithaka is affiliated with JSTOR and ARTstor, and is currently incubating three initiatives: Aluka, a project with an aim to make primary source material for and about the developing world more widely available in digital form; NITLE, an effort to help smaller colleges make full use of new electronic and networking technologies to support teaching and research; and Portico, an effort to build a trusted and reliable archive of born-electronic journals.

In pursuing this mission, Ithaka engages in three primary areas of activity:

1. shared services, which includes the provision of administrative, financial and technical services to a small group of incubated and affiliated entities;
   
   
2. research, which is dedicated to supporting the cost recovery goals of affiliated and incubated entities while also informing the general higher education community of the impact of new technologies on present modes of operation; and
   
   
3. strategic services, through which it offers strategic advice based on a combination of experience and access to a unique network of relationships with leaders in higher education, philanthropy, business and technology.

Shared Services
The Shared Service units include Financial Services, Human Resources, Information Technology, and Technology Innovation and Development. 

Financial Services has two primary functions: to oversee and execute the day-to-day accounting needs for the Affiliates and to provide financial modeling support for planning purposes.  In addition, the financial services group works with outside auditors to insure that each organization’s financial activity is properly managed and conforms to acceptable accounting practices.

Human Resources is responsible for the design and development of human resources policies and programs that reflect the values and culture of the incubated entities, the Affiliates and the Foundation.  Services range from providing assistance in hiring and orienting new staff, to negotiating and managing employee benefits programs, to advising managers with performance or other issues.

Information Technology (IT) provides two primary types of services.  First, it provides support for the basic IT infrastructure associated with the day-to-day work of the Affiliates and the Foundation.  This includes purchasing, installing, maintaining, and providing support for desktop PCs and associated hardware and software.  The IT group also oversees relationships with outside vendors of computer, data, and telecommunications equipment and services.  The second and major area of responsibility for the IT group is in managing the public server infrastructure that provides 24/7 access to the JSTOR and ARTstor databases.  These servers operate in multiple countries.  To provide a sense of scale and the importance of very high reliability, the 20 million page JSTOR database receives several hundred million significant accesses annually.

Technology Innovation & Development engages in prototyping and researching potentially valuable technologies for Mellon and the Affiliates and supports the research interests of the Foundation's Research in Technology program.

Research
Research (http://www.ithaka.org/research.htm)  serves the academic community in its shift to an increasingly electronic environment by developing strategic information in an actionable form that allows individual organizations to adapt to this new environment. The research group also seeks to identify knowledge that is isolated in individual organizations, and whenever possible to share this knowledge broadly.

Strategic Services
Strategic Services (http://www.ithaka.org/strategic.htm)  helps innovative initiatives develop and execute sustainable business plans by drawing on the expertise of our staff and of our extended network of contacts from the higher education, philanthropic, technology, and business sectors. In early 2005, the group also extended these services to organizations outside of the Affiliates.

The strategic services unit offers support in areas such as strategic planning, competitive and market analysis, business models, governance structures, technical approaches, and legal strategies. It also provides a mechanism for our affiliated organizations to share experiences and advice with those that face similar challenges.