1.2 Participants  (Page 4/4)

Libraries seek to acquire digital resources that will serve the needs of a wide range of users. Despite thebudgetary constraints that they face, they remain committed to acquiring as many print monographs as possible. They do not wish topurchase resources twice—that is, if they already have them in one form they do not wish to purchase them a second time in anotherformat or bundled with other content. Such policies depress the appetite of libraries for books that are explicitly based ondissertations if, as is usually the case, dissertations are already available in print or electronic forms. Well aware of the decliningsales potential of dissertation-based monographs, some standard book distributors deliberately exclude them from their offerings,and editors are cautious to accept such manuscripts.

Libraries generally welcome innovative products that represent new forms of scholarship and presentation,however, and prefer pricing and access models that allow them to make resources easily available to their patrons whether they areworking on campus, from home, or in the field. This preference creates a strong potential market for electronic publication in arthistory.

Museums

Museums are major publishers of art historical scholarship, primarily through the genres of the collectioncatalogue, the exhibition publication, and the museum-based journal. The most active area of publication is centered onexhibitions, which typically yield catalogues of the kind described under Genres of Scholarly Publication . Other exhibition publications include books of essays with asummary checklist, special issues of museum journals, and edited volumes or onlinepostings of papers based on exhibition symposia.

A significant development in museum publications over the past decade has been their outsourcing touniversity presses. The arrangement is mutually beneficial. To the university press, a publication done in partnership with a museumguarantees advance book sales and thus profitability. It also offers the press the superior marketing and visibility that comeswith participation in significant exhibitions, and it allows the press to expand its list without significant additional editorialinvestment. Several museums have research centers attached to them, and the relationship to such museums gives presses privilegedaccess to the authors associated with them.

Respondents to our survey of university press editors reported that 24.5 percent of the art history bookspublished by their presses over the past three years were exhibition catalogues and another five percent were museum-relatedtitles of other kinds. Yale University Press has been particularly successful in developing partnerships with museums (and researchcenters linked to them). Other publishers, such as Princeton University Press and University of Washington Press, are using thiscollaborative publication model effectively as well. There is a perception that these museum-related publications may have takenthe place of single-author monographs in the total number of art history books published, but our study did not find evidence tosupport this view. While the absolute number of museum-related works published by the eight leading university presses hasincreased over time, from about seven per year between 1985 and 1989 to about 19 per year between 2000 and 2004 (driven almostentirely by Yale), museum-related titles account for about the same percentage of all art history titles published today (nine percent)as they did in the late 1980s (seven percent). The absolute growth in museum publications represents a welcome increase in theopportunities for publishing art historical scholarship, even if the genre would benefit from scholarly enhancement.

Readers

Compared to most humanities, art history enjoys a large readership of professional art historians,intellectuals in adjacent fields, students (art history courses remain popular on North American campuses), and a large and growingpublic of museum visitors and cultural tourists. Authors as well as readers have a stake in the widest and lowest-cost distribution ofscholarship in its monographic as well as its synthetic and survey forms. The broadest readership is currently well served by thepublication system when it comes to surveys and exhibition publications, although price often constitutes a barrier. Themonographs needed by the smaller subset of disciplinary experts have become scarcer because of the linked phenomena of decreasinglibrary sales, declining publication of new monographs, smaller print runs, increasing costs-per-copy, and rising prices.

Scholarly publication in art history has yet to find ways of reaching and addressing a rapidly growing onlinereadership. Readers of all generations, but especially students, have become increasingly adept at finding information, followingarguments, and exchanging opinions on the worldwide web, whether for personal interest or college credit.