Today we sent letters to some 30 UNC Press authors to let them know that their books have been chosen to be included in our online publishing pilot and give them a chance to opt out if they wish. This pilot will follow up the prototype that we demonstrated last Spring and incorporate some of what we have learned from our focus groups and survey so far. The following description is adapted from the letter to authors.
One central initiative of the LCRM project is the development of an online publishing platform that will enable connections among secondary works and a variety of primary sources. We are now preparing to develop a pilot implementation of this platform, testing its potential with a small collection of UNC Press books.
Scope of the publishing pilot. The core function of the publishing platform we are developing will allow users to create connections between scholarly books and digital archives of primary sources. The primary sources that we are most interested in are those that enrich the narrative in a published book—digitized versions of pamphlets, reports, letters, diaries, photographs, interviews (in transcript and/or audio form), or film. The online functionality that the LCRM project team is developing will allow the addition of comments or annotations that include links to such digitized sources, enabling creation over time of a multilayered e-version of the book.
An online survey of scholars and some informal focus group meetings with professors in a variety of fields have suggested that this new mode of publishing has the potential to support teaching, spark conversation and the building of communities of users around the books, reveal new avenues of research, lead to collaboration and new publications, drive sales of the print versions, and influence digitization priorities at the UNC Library and at other institutions and archives. If this pilot is successful in accomplishing some or all of those things, we will explore ways to sustain the collection via subscription, membership, or other business models.
In addition to the selected UNC Press books, we will also include in the pilot a small selection of “grey literature” such as Center for Civil Rights conference papers. We expect to make the full text of the books and papers available in the new online platform for two publishing seasons, spring and fall of 2010 (exact launch date to be announced); if at the end of that period we recognize a need to continue the test period, we will let you know.
Access. The pilot collection will be hosted by the UNC Library and password protected; users who have access to the full text of the collection will be specifically invited to participate by UNC Press and asked to accept terms of use and commenting rules and guidelines. Spam will be automatically filtered out and any inappropriate comments will be removed by project staff. The central community of invited users will consist of the participating authors; the LCRM project Board of Consultants; scholars who took our online survey and expressed interest in multilayered online publications; and librarians who might be interested in adding comments and links and who represent potential institutional subscribers. Additional users may be invited to participate at the discretion of UNC Press and the LCRM project staff, and we will be interested in recommendations from the initial invited group.
Features. Once registered, users will be able to sign in and search the collection. Each book will have a home page, and the text will be presented in a readable layout to fit the computer screen. It will be possible to print sections of the books but not the entire book at one time. The original text from the print version will remain untouched, and any comments will appear only when the comment icon is clicked, so that it will be possible to read the original book with or without the comments. An icon near each paragraph will indicate how many comments, if any, have been made on that part of the text. Each comment will carry the name of the person who authored it. We expect to continue to develop the features during the pilot period.
Watch this site for more news on the pilot as it develops.
The first audio book which I bought was Doctor who audio book. Now I have hundreds of audio book in my audio library and I listen to them whenever I get time.