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so you and i are talking today because um we're announcing uh an investment from uh by ithaca into ano
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our public benefit corporation and um you and i have been talking about this now for almost three years and i'm curious
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why did you guys decide to make uh this investment well i think i think that first it's been it's been great to get to know you and we have a lot of faith in your leadership of of the enterprise and also
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just the commitment you've made to open infrastructure over a number of years and um you know i think we first did some collaborative work with with hypothesis as much as i don't know seven or eight years ago and you and
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i've gotten to know each other over several years three or three years at least and you know just realizing at a first level that annotation just seems like an important part of education it's kind of unrealized
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and that eventually annotations got to be a part of the learning process right i mean just the notion of a faculty member uh teaching students giving them the opportunity to
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asynchronously engage with a a written document and and have a discussion online i mean that just it seems inevitable to me that that's that's necessary and the approach that that um
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that hypothesis has taken and i was taking with an open interoperable infrastructure for that that all different resources can use is definitely the way to go as opposed to some proprietary approach to try to create
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you know loyalty or stickiness on one and you know one company's platform so so i think we were we were taken both by the the idea of of annotation being an important part of
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education and also by the approach that you've taken and the leadership you've provided to to work very hard to do that in an open way and you know it's taken years some
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years for you to get you know traction on that and uh you know our hope is that that that that time for impact is here and that you are well well timed for that to have
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the impact that that you want to have so you know i think from a standpoint of just investing in the community and what i was saying before about moving toward open it it seemed appropriate for us to try to accelerate
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or help um with with something we thought was an important tool an important component of open infrastructure uh that we could support that now at the same time it will be very good for jstor users
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right if we can uh work with you collaboratively to develop uh the capability and you know really easily and really conveniently for people to do annotation over jstor
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articles and other content that we're adding to the platform so there's a there's a direct um benefit for for our user community if we can if we can work effectively together
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so so the idea that we could also uh both support through an investment uh the broad principles and mission of the organization and at the same time work together with you to actually
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improve the product and service that people get both when they work with jstor where they're using jstor and when they have an opportunity to use hypothesis whether that's on our platform or you know other
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other providers uh that seems like just a you know a wonderful win-win if you will on both sides and you know great for uh for the community generally so we're supporting open we're supporting jstor we're supporting hypothesis and most
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importantly we're supporting the users that we think um annotation can really uh help uh improve their learning and improve the teaching so uh so you know we're super excited about about it and you know really happy that
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that you know after this time we've been able to figure out a way to work together so so we're very excited that's true um um so my understanding is that this is actually the
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first time that uh that ithaca has made this kind of an investment in another organization um and um how how did it uh how did it come about that um that you
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guys decided to to go in this direction yeah so i think i think the the the question of making investments in um in other organizations i think it's really fundamentally about
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accelerating the mission like how are there's there may be some things that we can do well ourselves uh but there may be some things that we're just not well positioned to do ourselves or we can't do it fast enough and if we really want to serve our
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community there are better ways for us to invest the resources that we have or spend the money that we have so for example i mean we we believe that that annotation is a really important
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uh potential tool and we think it's inevitable we could you know have our product teams develop an annotation layer you know or service um this just seems a such a better way to to go about
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doing that um and as i said before to to invest in open at the same time makes a lot of sense so we're thinking about um how do we make the best use of our resources and while
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you know there'll be you know we're not a you know we're not a company an organization that's going to have huge investments in other companies or you know acquiring a bunch of companies or anything like that but i think we are going to look to ways that
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we can um uh advance our mission and and serve our community and if we can do that faster and better uh we'll do that now there are a couple examples that were not investments but that also fit this one
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is reveal digital uh which we we brought into the organization several years ago um another is art store which we merged with with jstor uh five or six years ago these are these are opportunities for us
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to um you know in the case of of of reveal digital uh to bring primary source content that libraries care about and having made open onto the jstor uh infrastructure as i was saying earlier in artstors case bringing images onto
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the platform and and working to integrate the image and text experience for for scholars and students so so we look for those opportunities and this was one where you know we feel like we can we can um we can have an impact and
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accelerate our impact uh in the community by an investment uh not a you know an acquisition or something like that so uh you know great opportunity for us to bring together the um as i say before the the investment in
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open and also the the impact for our users
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