0.24 Response to rotunda: a university press starts a digital  (Page 2/4)

Much of this evolution seems to have been invisible to editors, publishers, and publishing services in the humanities and social sciences. Or perhaps, if it was known, it was deemed too expensive to implement, although in the recent several years, some e-journals in the humanities and social sciences have implemented some of these features. On the other hand, as Penelope Kaiserlian has demonstrated, some humanities authors, editors, and publishers have undertaken a separate evolution. Indeed, the Rotunda project is impressive and laudable for its engagement with scholars and their desiderata for expression using Web-based technologies. Kaiserlian reports on aspects of sustaining such editions as Rotunda has published, focusing primarily on the requirement to keep the editions lively and to continue to survey, harvest, and expand the universe of related sites, reflecting the essential, homeostatic nature of the best Web publications. Her report does not, however, address the problem of digital archiving for long-term access and use and particularly the requirement that any good digital archive of publications like those of Rotunda will ingest and then present, regardless of the passage of time and generations of technology, a faithful rendition of the original site’s content and features. To be more pointed, here is another, if not yet realized, example of the inadequacy of any digital archiving that “normalizes” content.

Meanwhile, other university presses have issued some of their books in e-book forms through various distributors (ebrary, Amazon, 24x7, NetLibrary) and their own websites. If the experience of the Stanford University Press is typical, sales of those e-books amount to only small increments in gross revenues. On the other hand, one has to be aware of the great success, in financial as well as intellectual senses, of such e-reference works as the OED online. And those of us straddling both the university press and university library fence know that some of the larger academic publishers meanwhile have begun offering annual tranches of e-versions of their books with attractive rates for what amount to bulk purchases, provision for local indexing and analysis of the supplied texts, and agreements permitting local preservation in digital archives.

Rotunda could not have been started or gotten to its present state without the outside funding it received. Implied by Kaiserlian’s observations is a revision of the standard estimate of the five-year period needed to go from the first issue of a publication to sustaining income for it. Where will Rotunda find the money not just to sustain these publications as issued, but to add content and features as the scholarly community adds material of relevance? And who will support the digital archive of the various versions of Rotunda’s publications?

Here are a few e-genres that have appeared since the mid-1990s:

• Passive page images of conventionally published articles and books, sometimes with cross-searching (e.g. articles delivered through JSTOR)
• Digital compendiums, anthologies, and “complete” works, some with expanded descriptions, digital images of sources, associated bibliographies of secondary material (e.g. The Matthew Parker Online Library – (External Link) ; The papers of George Washington in the Rotunda edition)
• Fluid-text editions that might be regarded as examples of a new philology (e.g., Herman Melville’s ‘ Typee ’: a fluid-text edition [2007]— (External Link)
• New narratives (streams of text, media objects, working software-based models, hyperlinks to related material as well as hyperlinked citations)
• Lively monographs (conventional monographs, but with images and hyperlinked citations)
• GIS-based compilations and views (e.g. Richard White et al, Spatial History Project— (External Link) ; David Rumsey Map Collection— (External Link) ; Mapping the Republic of Letters— (External Link) )
• Image-bases (Artstor, AMICA Library).