3.2 Problems of transition  (Page 2/2)

Cost

There are warnings that digital monographs are not cheaper to produce than books. Clifford Lynch points outelectronic monographs displace costs from the publishers to the scholar and site manager: "the economic dilemma of the monographhas not been solved, but only rearranged."

Preservation

The permanent preservation and access to digital materials is a major concern of scholars who regularlyexperience the complications of upgrading software and migrating data to new formats. The launch of Portico, an electronic archivingservice supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Itkaka, the Library of Congress and JSTOR, in 2005 offers a large-scalesolution to this structural problem. As news of Portico’s work permeates the scholarly community, the question of preservation andpermanent access will retreat, and migrating data will become a standard operation of cyberinfrastructure.

Versioning and the historiographic record

Wikipedia ’s model of collective authorship combined with the ease of revising digital files gives rise to afear that the updating of content, or versioning, will blur the historiographic record and obscure the stance of a scholar at agiven moment in time. Claims that electronic publication will nullify the concept of the author and integrity of the text, in anextreme variant of intertextuality, have a futuristic quality and suppose that technology determines outcomes. It is the case thatscholars can determine applications of the medium that best serve their goals if they take charge of such efforts. Hypertext, as anexample, is well suited to capture historiographical shifts and register disputes over dates, attributions, and interpretations.

It is instructive to recall the contested authority of printed books in early modern Europe. As Adrian Johnselaborates in his study of seventeenth-century England, books originally had weak claims on truth in part because of themulti-step publishing process, which subjected the author’s manuscript to manipulation by type setters, printers, binders andother players.