What #ColorOurCollections Suggests
Last week’s surprisingly successful social media campaign was a winning event for libraries, archives, and museums.
Bulwarks, Agility, and Foresight
[Editor’s note: This is the edited text of a presentation that Joe Esposito gave as a keynote at the PSP conference in Washington, D.C. on Feb. 3, 2016. The slides for the presentation are embedded at the end of the text. […]
The Importance of Academic (History) Writing
Historians can and do play a vital role in the public humanities, but there are vital reasons not just why but how we write for one another, too.
The Open Syllabus Project, Altmetrics, and a New Dataset
The Open Syllabus Project has created a database of over 1 million college syllabuses and extracted the names of the materials used in these courses. These materials are analyzed quantitatively and ranked. The creators of the service propose a new metric for the evaluation of academic publications.
An Interview with Lever Press
An interview with Charles Watkinson, Mike Row, and Mark Edington of the newly-announced Lever Press open access book initiative.
Making a Book from Scratch
If you tried to make a book from scratch, how would you do it?
The Network Model of Publishing
One of the unanticipated consequences of the introduction of digital media to scholarly publishing is that publishing properties increasingly are organized into networks, with one property pointing to another for the benefit of all. This essay describes the network publishing model and comments on some of a network’s characteristics and economic opportunities.
NYPL Shows Academic Libraries What "Public Domain" Means
The New York Public Library has now opened up hundreds of thousands of their digitized public-domain documents to unrestricted access and reuse, encouraging members the general public to exercise all the rights in those documents that the law gives them. Why aren’t more academic libraries doing the same thing?
Past, Present and Future: The Book (of Hours)
A centuries old genre of publication — can it inspire tomorrow’s book?
Dear Joe: Not-for-profit Publishers in “The Economy”
Robert Harington discusses Joe Esposito’s Scholarly Kitchen article from June 2015, entitled “The Mixed Marriage of For-profit and Not-for-Profit Publishing”, in context of his own experiences in the world of society publishing.
For Open Access Monographs, Peter Pays Paul. Who Pays Peter?
Gold open access for monographs is based on the notion that provosts will pay for what librarians will not. This seems like an improbable model for scholarly publishing. Publishing that is not based on end-user demand is not likely to have strong support in lean times.
Chefs’ Selections: The Best Books Read During 2015 Part 2
The beginning of the holiday season means it’s time for our annual list of our favorite books read during the year. Today brings Part 2 of the list.
Chefs’ Selections: The Best Books Read During 2015 Part 1
The beginning of the holiday season means it’s time for our annual list of our favorite books read during the year. Part 1 today, Part 2 tomorrow.
The Death of the Collection and the Necessity of Library-Publisher Collaboration: Young Librarians on the Future of Libraries
Applicants for a recent conference scholarship wrote essays that tended strongly to depict the traditional collection as dead and collaboration between librarians and publishers as essential to the library’s future. Do they herald a generational shift in mindset among librarians?
Guest Post: Richard Fisher on The Monograph: Keep On Keepin’ On*, Part Two
In Part Two, Richard Fisher looks at the past, the present and the future of monograph publishing in the humanities and social sciences.