Day: Wednesday, May 6, 11:30 AM to 12:30 PM
Room: TBD
Presenters: Allison Levy, Brown University; Sarah McKee, Emory University; Sara Sikes, University of Connecticut
Description: Over the past decade, the scholarly community has created a remarkable, and often overwhelming, array of digital tools, publishing platforms, and models for open access funding and distribution. Humanities and social sciences scholars are increasingly eager to take advantage of these developments to explore new digital expressions, and potentially new audiences, for their monographs. But the production of digital monographs presents a unique challenge, as workflows, peer review standards, and even basic vocabulary are just beginning to evolve. Moreover, authors often require new kinds of support from their home institutions, particularly through libraries and digital scholarship centers, to realize their project visions. This session brings together authors and digital scholarship professionals to share their stories of collaboration in publishing digital monographs of all stripes—from enhanced open access editions of conventional print books to born-digital interactive scholarly works. How did these works come into being? Why were the authors committed to digital publication? What support did their home institutions provide? When and how did publishers enter the picture? What challenges emerged during the editorial and production processes, and how were they resolved? How can we encourage a shared vocabulary for these digital publications among the wider scholarly communications community? The session focuses less on demonstrating the case studies themselves and more on the ways in which various stakeholders collaborated to fully realize the project/author’s vision. Audience members will be invited to share their own stories, including challenges and questions arising with their own digital publications or works in progress.