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Digital Library Federation Washington, D.C. Acknowledgments About the Authors Foreword 1. Introduction
2. Summary of Findings
3. Review of Resources
Appendixes
References A multitude of people made this report possible, and I would like to thank them, starting with Donald J. Waters of The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, who entrusted me with the preliminary report that served as the foundation for this expanded version. J. Paul Hunter (University of Virginia) offered expert advice as a consultant to the Mellon Foundation on the original report. Second, I am indebted to the many outstanding digital scholars and practitioners who participated in telephone interviews, generously sharing their knowledge and opinions; their names are listed in Appendix 1. Third, I appreciate the guidance and patience of the Council on Library and Information Resources and the Digital Library Federation, particularly David Seaman, whose commitment to this report never flagged. Daphnée Rentfrow, a former CLIR Postdoctoral Fellow and independent scholar, agreed to assist me with the report in its final stage. She is the lead author for section 3.5, Collections by Design. In addition, she provided valuable feedback and editorial advice about the entire report. I also owe thanks to a number of specialists who answered my e-mail inquiries and provided additional information, including Willard McCarty (King's College London) for prepublication access to the manuscript of Humanities Computing (forthcoming Palgrave 2005); Kenneth M. Roemer (University of Texas, Arlington) for valuable advice; Mary Mark Ockerbloom for clarifications about the Web resource Celebration of Women Writers; Mary Beth Barilla of Blackwell Publishing for a review copy of A Companion to Digital Humanities (Schreibman et al. 2004); Marge Gammon (NetLibrary) for a copy of her American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter 2005 PowerPoint presentation; Lou Burnard, of the TEI Consortium, for pointing me to Electronic Textual Editing (2004) and answering my questions; Edward M. Griffin (University of Minnesota) and Edward J. Gallagher (Lehigh University) for information about their presentations at the Society of Early Americanists' 2005 conference; David Nicholls (MLA Book Publications) for arranging permission to reprint excerpts from “Guiding Questions for Vetters of Scholarly Editions” in Appendix 2; Deborah Thomas (Library of Congress) for providing a copy of her ALA Midwinter 2005 PowerPoint presentation about the National Digital Newspaper Program; Tom Franklin for answering questions about the Digital Book Index; Dayna Holz for answering questions about the California Digital Library's eScholarship program; Daniel J. Cohen (George Mason University) for responding to inquiries about SyllabusFinder; Jill Fluvog (DiMeMa Inc.) for information about CONTENTdm® Digital Collection Management Software; and John L. Bryant (Hoftstra University) for updates regarding the Melville Society's Web site. Nor would the report have been possible without a variety of publishers providing me with trial access to their products, including ProQuest (EEBO, LION); the Modern Language Association (ADE [Association of Departments of English] Web site); Choice/Association of College & Research Libraries (ChoiceReviews.Online); Readex (Evans and Shaw-Shoemaker Digital Editions, Early American Newspapers); Thomson Gale (ECCO, LitFinder); Columbia University Press (Gutenberg-e); University of Virginia Press (Rotunda collection); OCLC (First Search/WorldCat); and Alexander Street Press (Black Short Fiction, Women and Social Movements, North American Theatre Online). A number of specialists read drafts of different sections of this report. Their comments improved it substantially. These reviewers include Edward L. Ayers (University of Virginia); Angela Courtney (Indiana University Libraries); Shawn Martin, Mark Sandler, and Perry Willett (University of Michigan Libraries); and John Unsworth (University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana). Martha L. Brogan New Haven, August 2005 Martha L. Brogan is an independent library consultant with two decades of experience in academic libraries, most recently as associate dean and director of collection development at Indiana University Libraries-Bloomington. During her five-year tenure at Indiana University, Ms. Brogan helped launch the Wright American Fiction project within the Committee on Institutional Cooperation. Previously, she served as a social sciences librarian at Yale University and as a Western European library specialist and assistant to the provost and vice president of academic affairs at the University of Minnesota. In 2003, the Digital Library Federation commissioned Ms. Brogan to write A Survey of Digital Library Aggregation Services. She was a fellow in the Frye Leadership Institute sponsored by the Council on Library and Information Resources, Educause, and Emory University in 2001. Daphnée Rentfrow has spent the past five years investigating the use of digital projects in course development. She holds a Ph.D. in comparative literature from Brown University, where from 2001–2004 she was on the research faculty with an appointment in the Department of Modern Culture and Media. She was a senior editor and project manager for the Modernist Journals Project at Brown, where she developed materials for students and scholars using this digital collection. She recently held a CLIR Postdoctoral Fellowship in Scholarly and Information Resources for Humanists at Yale University, where she concentrated on teaching and learning support in the use of digital text and images. The study of American literature is not limited to schools and colleges in the United States; “Am Lit” is a popular course of study all over the world, as a glimpse at the Web-usage statistics of any of the sites in this report would make abundantly clear. Given this need, and mindful of the rich holdings of manuscript, typescript, and printed materials that fill our libraries and archives, it is not surprising that from the earliest digitizing experiments, librarians turned their attention to American cultural heritage materials, and that both scholarly and amateur sites devoted to American authors have flourished from the early days of the Web. Compared with students in many other humanistic disciplines, students specializing in American literature are well served with online primary works and related manuscripts or other contextual material — from the earliest novels to licensed, copyrighted works from twentieth-century poets and dramatists. This richness, however, is scattered and fragmentary: Some material is publicly accessible, and some is subscription based; some is full of insights from scholars, and some is the work of hobbyists; some is accurately digitized, and some distractingly not so. And nowhere is all this material gathered and categorized, revealed, and reviewed. Around this mass of material and its somewhat uncoordinated activity swirl all the fears and debates about the value of digital scholarship; the role and nature of peer review in this arena; the stifling effect of current copyright (especially in regard to so-called orphaned works, whose owners are impossible to find); the need for easier and more-powerful tools to capture, enrich, and analyze this material; and the excitement of new research and teaching possibilities. These factors, coupled with the growing availability of American literature resources online, make this report, commissioned as an internal document by The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and expanded for publication through a partnership between the Council on Library and Information Resources and the Digital Library Federation, a timely and much needed work. Martha Brogan has done a splendid job of analyzing a complex digital landscape and of synthesizing the feedback of nearly 40 scholars and librarians. The results, part annotated survey of resources divided by type (e.g., subject gateways, author studies) and part analysis of prevailing trends and opinions, should help us discover what exists already, identify major resource gaps, and, on this basis, pull together the multiple shards of opinion and observation into a coherent narrative. This report will be useful to anyone interested in the current state of online American literature resources. It will also be of use to individuals with a general interest in the shifts in scholarly communication and pedagogy that our universities and colleges are experiencing, and in humanities scholars' responses to the opportunities and pitfalls afforded by digital library collections and services. David Seaman, Executive Director — Lord Byron, Don Juan, II, XCIII. . .this rainbow looked like Hope —
1. INTRODUCTIONThe word kaleidoscope comes from a Greek phrase meaning “to view a beautiful form,” and this report makes the leap of faith that “all scholarship is beautiful” (Ayers 2005b). The point here is not to pit one medium against another but to explore what digital resources offer to the study of American literature. This report recognizes myriad digital projects, attempting to reveal and lay out the various brightly colored shards into a provisional pattern of coherence. Its purpose is twofold: to offer a sampling of the types of digital resources currently available or under development in support of American literature; and to identify the prevailing concerns of specialists in the field as expressed during interviews conducted between July 2004 and May 2005. Part two of the report consolidates the results of these interviews with an exploration of resources currently available to illustrate, on the one hand, a kaleidoscope of differing attitudes and assessments, and, on the other, an underlying design that gives shape to the parts. Part three examines six categories of digital work in progress: (1) quality-controlled subject gateways, (2) author studies, (3) public domain e-book collections and alternative publishing models, (4) proprietary reference resources and full-text primary source collections, (5) collections by design, and (6) teaching applications. This survey is informed by a selective review of the recent literature, focusing especially on contributions by scholars appearing in discipline-based journals. 1.1 Scope1.1.1 What Is American Literature?The study of American literature is inseparable from an examination of its cultural context. From the era of exploration and discovery through the Revolutionary period, American literature is found in diverse forms: in poetry, captivity narratives, essays, letters, speeches, travel accounts, religious tracts, sermons, political and commercial documents, and diaries. The study of early American literature, in particular, is inherently interdisciplinary, drawing from history, religion, economics, geography, and political philosophy, and difficult to separate from the social sciences. Moreover, American literature before the nineteenth century cannot easily be divorced from English literature, since until the early nineteenth century, publishers and most readers were located in England. Adding to this confusion, the study of American literature of the past two centuries has traditionally been organized by author and genre — notably, fiction, poetry, drama, and prose nonfiction. Kenneth Roemer (University of Texas, Arlington) at his Web site Covers, Titles, and Tables: The Formations of American Literary Canons provides insight to the changing conception of the subject by gathering in one place the tables of contents of important histories and anthologies of American literature published from 1829 up to the present. As these listings make clear, a few simple questions recur, but have different answers, as the decades go by:
1.1.2 ParametersThese changing definitions influence the curriculum, the organization of scholarly societies, and the scope of scholarly resources. They are also manifest in the different priorities, needs, and expectations of stakeholders who use and create digital resources to support the field. This survey reflects the enormous breadth of academic inquiry in American literature, extending from the Early Americas Digital Archive, a growing collection of electronic editions of early texts originally written in or about the Americas (circa 1492–1820) and culminating with the Electronic Literature Directory, created by the Electronic Literature Organization to provide easy access to “cutting-edge literature” and new forms of writing. [1] Despite its breadth, the survey is by no means exhaustive. It highlights representative projects to illustrate the types of resources available and how they might be put to use. It also attempts to summarize the current trends and prevailing issues in the application of digital technologies to teaching and research in American literature. Given the formidable expertise of the respondents, the growing body of literature, and the proliferation of digital materials, a report such as this can best be understood as a starting point for deeper inquiry and as an invitation for more-extensive conversations among its many stakeholders. The preponderance of resources under review predate 1923, reflecting the constraints of making copyrighted materials available online. Twentieth-century literature and new forms of the literary avant-garde are, regrettably, largely ignored with the notable exception of the work of the Electronic Literature Organization. The report draws examples from major genres, including fiction, poetry, drama, and prose nonfiction, but various subgenres are excluded, for example, literary history, children's literature, history of the book, film studies, and literary criticism and theory. [2] While there are examples drawn from women's, ethnic, and regional literature, these fields are not covered systematically. Applications of new technology to composition and creative writing are excluded. In terms of formats, books and electronic full-text resources take precedence over periodicals and newspapers. [3] The discussion of commercial databases is restricted primarily to reference resources and full-text primary source collections. A discussion of commercial e-book providers such as NetLibrary and eBrary was beyond the scope of this report. Finally, the report excludes Web resources that point users primarily to printed works, such as PAL: Perspectives in American Literature — A Research and Reference Guide (edited by Paul P. Reuben, California State University-Stanislaus) and the Outline of American Literature, sponsored by the U.S. Department of State, International Information Programs (edited by Kathryn VanSpanckeren, University of Tampa). 1.1.3 TypologiesResources are grouped into broad categories in order to identify common characteristics, trends, and challenges. In the absence of any agreed-upon vocabulary, typology, or taxonomy for digital genres in this field, the author identified a few broad categories as a convenient way to focus the discussion in areas of high activity. The placement of any particular resource is open to debate, and many resources could have been discussed under a variety of rubrics. As one frustrated scholar suggested, there must be some labels other than the ones he has been using — “magnet sites, sponge sites, mall sites, tentacled sites, etc.” The report does rely to the extent practicable on two digital manifestations, or genres, that enjoy some degree of definition: quality-controlled subject gateway (Koch 2000), and thematic research collections (Unsworth 2000b; Palmer 2004). The concept of electronic scholarly editions is also well documented thanks to the publication of Electronic Textual Editing (Burnard et al. 2004) and the Modern Language Association of America's revised “Guidelines for Editors of Scholarly Editions” (MLA 2005). The various genres need more-precise definition so as to indicate what is unique about them. More than terminology is at stake, as Brown University's Julia Flanders, editor of Women Writers Online, suggests in her provocative essay “Trusting the Electronic Edition.” Scholars need to make a distinction, she writes, between “editions which are primarily pedagogical in their aims, those which aim above all at scholarly authority, and those which attempt to provide textual information as high-quality data which can be analyzed and processed” (Flanders 1998, 301). In practice, many scholars use the term electronic archives (e.g., The Walt Whitman Archive, Dickinson Electronic Archives) in preference to either thematic research collections or electronic scholarly editions. As the editors of The William Blake Archive explain: Though “archive” is the term we have fallen back on, in fact we envision a unique resource unlike any other currently available for the study of Blake — a hybrid all-in-one edition, catalogue, database, and set of scholarly tools capable of taking full advantage of the opportunities offered by new information technology. (See explanation of the word archive at http://www.blakearchive.org/.) 1.2 InterviewsBetween July 2004 and May 2005, the author conducted telephone and e-mail interviews with nearly 40 scholars, librarians, and practitioners (Appendix 1). This cohort represents practicing digital specialists as well as representative organizational leaders. Although the interviewees figure among the best-known experts in their respective fields, each made a point of referring the author to several other colleagues who are also doing important digital work. The interviews were open-ended and unstructured, often using the person's particular digital project as a starting point, but endeavoring to learn how well scholars of American literature in general are served by existing digital resources and what is most needed to advance digital scholarship. What are the immediate priorities: ramping up the speed of full-text digitization, creating a more cohesive and integrated portal, developing tools for text mining and manipulation, or promoting innovative training models? How much attention should be devoted to standards, promotion-and-tenure practices, and preservation of data? Has the technology begun transforming instruction and research? If not, what are the barriers? Part two of this report is an attempt to summarize the major issues and concerns revealed by these interviews. 1.3 Resource DescriptionsThe resource annotations in this report are not intended as original, evaluative critiques. Most are taken from the descriptions at the provider's Web site with little or no editing. Readers should refer to James L. Harner's Literary Research Guide: An Annotated Listing of Reference Sources in English Literary Studies (2002) for qualitative annotations of reference sources and consult his ongoing list of updated entries that is freely available online. The Charleston Advisor: Critical Reviews of Web Products for Information Professionals, a modestly priced subscription journal, provides free online access to some resource reviews (e.g., Google Scholar, December 2004) and columns (e.g., the interview with Ted Koppel of The Library Corporation on Standards, April 2005). It is an excellent source for critical evaluations of tools and Web trends across all disciplines. In addition, the regular columns in C&RL News on Internet resources on specific topics, including many related to American literature, provide good overviews of Web sites (1998–present). Previously published reviews are freely accessible to all through the American Library Association, Association of College & Research Libraries (ACRL) Web site. It is unfortunate that current updates are restricted to ACRL members, since many people would benefit from being able to obtain the most current listings. [4] 1.4 Delving Deeper into the LiteratureThis report examines developments only over the past dozen years, that is, since the ascendance of the Web. The history of humanities computing and its application to literary studies extends back decades. Readers seeking a deeper historical context should refer to Susan Hockey's Electronic Texts in the Humanities (2000) and her chapter “The History of Humanities Computing” in A Companion to Digital Humanities (Schreibman et al. 2004). Thomas Rommel's chapter in Schreibman's volume also places literary studies into a historical context. Librarians new to the field will find useful discussions in Betty H. Day and William A. Wortman's Literature in English: A Guide for Librarians in the Digital Age (2000), which includes implications for collection management, library instruction, and reference among other topics. [5] Finally, among the recent outstanding works exploring issues only touched upon in this report, readers should refer to the essays in Electronic Textual Editing (Burnard et al. 2004); A Companion to Digital Humanities (Schreibman et al. 2004); Humanities Computing (McCarty 2005); and the readings cited at A Networked Interface for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship (NINES.org) Web site. In closing, readers can look forward to the recommendations of the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS) Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences later in 2005. These recommendations will, no doubt, provide a blueprint for the future that complements many of the findings in this report. 1.5 A Word about the AudienceThis report gives an overview of areas of concentrated activity in digital American literature. It is intended primarily for the nonspecialist — librarian, instructor, publisher, university administrator — who seeks an introduction to the field and wants to know more about the prevailing issues and the types of digital resources available. Experts in any given aspect of digital work — scholarly editing, text conversion, metadata, the preservation and archiving of data, American literature Web sites, textual theory — may discover little new here in their area of specialization and find reason to object to the casual treatment of complicated topics. Whatever its shortcomings, the report aims to stimulate a productive dialogue in the wider community and lead to a better understanding of what is at stake in the world of digital scholarship. 2. SUMMARY OF FINDINGS2.1 “A Revolution Led from Above”Lest anyone forget the extent to which the academy now relies on digital media, Edward L. Ayers, dean of the College and Graduate School of Arts and Sciences at the University of Virginia — in a series of hopeful talks delivered around the country on scholarship in the digital age — emphatically reminds everyone of the transformation that has taken place in the past decade. [6] Citing technological advances in networking, mass storage, digital conversion, and speed, Ayers notes that millions of objects — scanned, transcribed, and cataloged, including (as borne out in this report) books, articles, diaries, letters, newspapers, films, artifacts, oral histories, and images — are now available to millions of people. He recalls those days, not very long ago, when scholars denounced the disappearing library card catalog and its conversion to an online environment. Creating digital copies of journal articles (enter JSTOR) likewise met with initial disapprobation. Now, a few short years later, scholars realize the power of linking directly from the library's online catalog and a host of specialized databases to digital objects of all types. As Ayers remarks, scholars are now “demanding” around-the-clock online access not only from their offices but also from their lakeside cabins and, librarians would add, from their sabbatical and fellowship posts around the globe. While the texts of their trade are rapidly becoming available anywhere, anytime, humanities scholars, who might have much to gain from digital media's potential to spread their scholarship, remain firmly committed to traditional forms. Why is it, Ayers wonders, that humanities scholarship is dedicated to constant change and innovation, “yet the institutions in which it is embedded, maybe especially the monograph and the scholarly article, have been remarkably, even stubbornly, stable?” He argues that scholarship should be able to take any form as long as it adheres to the fundamental principles of “documented research and rigorous, anonymous peer review.” But humanities scholars, in large part, have resisted change, viewing digital media as “a dissolution, distraction, a diversion” from their “real work.” Recent Ph.D.s interviewed for this report bear witness to even harsher judgments by established faculty in English departments about the value of digital media: It is irrelevant to scholarship, a matter of indifference to them, or not even in their consciousness. It is, then, no wonder that Ayers credits visionary librarians, professional societies, and their supporters in the philanthropic world with spearheading the transformation. It is “a revolution led from above,” he asserts, by powerful and prestigious agencies such as the American Historical Association (AHA), the American Council on Learned Societies (ACLS), the Council on Library and Information Resources (CLIR), the Digital Library Federation (DLF), and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. These national organizations have “sponsored ambitious efforts to create electronic monograph series and to foster new kinds of scholarship,” as also made evident by the review of resources in this report. Deploying multifaceted approaches, they have sponsored initiatives to encourage a new cadre of specialists who can, in the words of Ayers, both “walk the walk of a discipline and talk the talk of the digital world.” These national leaders, however, mindful of trends in society at large and concerned that the humanities keep pace, “are not waiting for scholars to build new things” before taking further action. Rather than risk being left behind, they hope to establish the requisite infrastructure by creating a digital “vacuum” that scholarship will rush to fill. While most of the scholars and practitioners interviewed for this report applaud these efforts — in fact, many of them are directly involved — they are renegades. Shifting the campus culture in the humanities, and perhaps especially in English departments, is a slow proposition. To paraphrase one senior campus administrator, you have to let people come to accept digital media on their own; you can't force it on them. His institution encourages experimentation and adoption by offering training and professional development support, but is moving “incrementally” while waiting for the next generation of faculty to accelerate the process. 2.2 Creating a Culture of InnovationThe University of Virginia repeatedly emerges as the place where digital innovation happens in the humanities. Ayers's trajectory of scholarship is a case study of how this paradigm shift occurred, giving his observations considerable weight. A decade ago, his Valley of the Shadow: Two Communities in the American Civil War, along with The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Hypermedia Research Archive, developed by his English department colleague Jerome McGann, formed the cornerstones of the newly created Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities (IATH) at the University of Virginia (UVa). Today, both innovators are award-winning, nationally recognized digital scholars. When they embarked on these projects in 1993, however, they were charting new territory. The Web had just presented itself as a new medium for the production and dissemination of scholarship, and because there were few standards, best practices, or computing tools to facilitate their work, Ayers and McGann had to invent them. John Unsworth, the prescient former director of IATH and now dean and professor of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, attributes IATH's success to two innovations. First, senior computing administrators insisted that all its projects focus on research, envisioning IATH as a fulcrum to leverage change in the institutional culture. By targeting research, rather than teaching with technology — which has a shorter developmental life cycle — they set the stage for serious long-term investigations. Moreover, Unsworth understood that teaching would be strengthened as a natural outcome of research because “the curriculum rests on scholarship” (Chodorow 1997). Second, in direct support of the first principle, IATH fellows were given generous two-year appointments “in residence” with a half-year teaching release time. “Forbidden from grant-writing during the first year,” they were forced to delve into their work before going out in search of external funds. [7] In his award-winning book Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web, McGann explains how IATH's commitment to the Web caused a fundamental shift in the character of his project: On the technical side, a major challenge for the institute and its fellows was to pursue long-term, large-scale humanities computing research projects with an almost ascetic rejection of the surface effects and short-term gains offered by proprietary software and proprietary data standards. In an apparently paradoxical way, IATH's W3 commitment drove its projects to make rigorous logical design a fundamental goal. This pursuit reflected a dedication to portability and the abstraction that enables it — even if it also entailed doing without good tools for creating or disseminating the scholarly work in the short run. As it happened, that commitment was to induce a profound shift in the principal focus and goals of The Rossetti Archive — moving it, in fact, from an editorial project per se to a machine for exploring the nature of textuality in more general and theoretical ways. (McGann 2001, 10–11) By bringing fellows together in a central, shared, intentional space, IATH fosters a sense of community and enables networking among scholars long after their residencies end. Time and again in this report, the premier examples of digital innovation emanate from IATH, although their influence now extends beyond the University of Virginia: The William Blake Archive, The Complete Writings and Pictures of Dante Gabriel Rossetti: A Hypermedia Research Archive, The Dickinson Electronic Archives, The Walt Whitman Archive, Uncle Tom's Cabin & American Culture: A Multi-Media Archive, and The Salem Witch Trials Documentary Archive and Transcripton Project, among others. [8] Unsworth calls these “thematic research collections,” and while their specific research agendas vary, he has identified the following characteristics that they have in common:
Unsworth's colleague Carole L. Palmer has reworked this list of attributes in an effort to separate content and function as reproduced in figure 1. Fig. 1. Features of thematic research collections
Source: Palmer 2004, 350 While thematic research collections emerged as IATH's signature contribution to scholarship, IATH also helped spawn parallel innovations in teaching and library services — often working in tandem with the UVa Library's Electronic Text Center. The net result is an impressive array of digital multimedia archives; easy-to-use teaching tools and interpretative Web sites; experimentation with hybrid public-commercial publishing; prodigious digital-conversion projects; advanced humanities computing tools; and an emerging infrastructure in the form of a digital-object repository (e.g., Fedora) with a commitment to long-term data preservation, migration, and access. 2.3 Building Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social SciencesApart from experts such as those interviewed for this report, it is safe to assume that most scholars of American literature could not begin to articulate, let alone imagine, what constitutes a cyberinfrastructure or why they would ever need it. Unsworth, who chairs the ACLS Commission on Cyberinfrastructure for the Humanities and Social Sciences, has quipped that the name itself has been the biggest obstacle to explaining the goals of the commission. Coined by the National Science Foundation (NSF) “to describe the new research environments in which capabilities of the highest level of computing tools are available to researchers in an interoperable network,” the word cyberinfrastructure, according to Unsworth, refers to any shared resource that “has utility beyond a particular project or institution,” e.g., people, tools, standards, or collections. [9] The investigations of the ACLS commission, which was formed in 2004, go much deeper into critical issues that are only touched upon in this report. [10] Readers are encouraged to review the papers of prominent constituents delivered in a series of public hearings held by the commission. The observations of noted classicist and digital innovator James O'Donnell (2004), provost of Georgetown University, and of Martin Mueller (2004), professor of classics and English at Northwestern University, echo the concerns of forward-looking campus administrators and literary scholars interviewed for this report. After a period of public commentary, says Unsworth, the commission's final report will be released later in 2005 with recommendations, outcomes, and next steps. Because the humanities and social sciences do not have any agency that is equivalent to the NSF to coordinate their research agendas, the commission will look to a coalition of private and public agencies, including the ACLS and other scholarly societies, private foundations, and government agencies, to fill the void. 2.4 Shaping the FutureWhen seeking innovative models relevant to American literature, the author repeatedly came upon ways in which the history profession has been actively engaged in an open, highly visible dialogue about the application of digital resources toward a transformation of their discipline. In contrast to their counterparts in literature, the AHA and the Organization of American Historians (OAH) have played leading roles in fostering innovation through large-scale partnerships such as the following:
A sampling of recent issues of core journals in American literature turned up very few articles testing the concept of digital scholarship (comparable to the article by Thomas and Ayers 2003); frankly assessing experimental programs (cf. Manning 2004); reviewing Web resources (as has the JAH since 2001); debating digital media's “transformative” impact on teaching (cf. Brown 2004a and 2004b, and others in Rethinking History; cf. Kornblith and Lasser 2003, in a collection of essays in the JAH; cf. Sklar 2002); or probing open-access issues (cf. Rosenzweig 2005). Martha Nell Smith's “Computing: What's American Literary Study Got to Do with IT?” in the December 2002 issue of American Literature, stands out as a rare contribution from a practicing digital scholar. The article attempts to explain the advantages of digital media and is based on her considerable experience as editor of the Dickinson Electronic Archives and director of the Maryland Institute for Technology in the Humanities (MITH). Also singular is Joanna Brooks's “New Media's Prospect: A Review of Web Resources in Early American Studies,” appearing in Early American Literature in 2004. It is in keeping with this slow acceptance of digital technology by scholars in the field that Jerome McGann's 2001 book Radiant Textuality: Literature after the World Wide Web, which garnered the Modern Language Association's James Russell Lowell Prize in 2002, was reviewed in American Literature only in 2004 (Ramirez 2004). More important, these are isolated achievements, unrelated to programmatic initiatives by the profession as a whole such as those now routinely emerging in American history. Modern Language Association of America. It is only natural to turn to the powerful MLA, which represents the interests of scholars in American literature within ACLS, to inquire about its leadership role in advancing digital scholarship. According to Executive Director Rosemary Feal, the MLA has three primary functions: (1) to promote and protect the scholarship of its members; (2) to continually adapt and evolve as a publisher to make publications that are useful for the research community; and (3) in collaboration with librarians, publishers, the ACLS, and other groups, to grapple with the changing environment and to chart a direction for the future. In support of these goals, Feal cites the following activities:
Finally, Feal notes that the MLA tries to be responsive when approached by its members about what it might to do to influence peer-review processes, especially for those who develop e-resources of high quality. This summary of the MLA's involvement is praiseworthy, and to this list should be added the prizes awarded by the organization to McGann's Radiant Textuality and to Morris Eaves (University of Rochester), Robert N. Essick (University of California, Riverside), and Joseph Viscomi (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill) for The William Blake Archive in 2001–02 — the first electronic edition to win the Distinguished Scholarly Edition award. Nevertheless, if the consensus of scholars interviewed in this report reflects the sentiments of the MLA's wider membership, its digital accomplishments are minor compared with what remains to be done — pointing at the very least to a public relations issue. One literature specialist, while noting numerous obstacles to more-widespread adoption of digital scholarship, referred to the lack of engagement by scholarly societies in general as the most serious problem of all. In reference to the MLA's leadership role in testing new forms of scholarly publication, another scholar asserted that it is “not even on the radar screen.” Yet another called the MLA Executive Council's stance on the crisis in scholarly publishing and tenure “hardly worth reading . . . completely misguided,” concluding that they “do not understand.” Two others spoke of “frustration” when trying to accomplish their work through MLA committees, having achieved their ultimate goal “despite” the parent organization. Finally, one disaffected member explains that the MLA has in recent decades become a “political organization, not a scholarly one” in which “literature is just a tool, not the true subject.” The most charitable observer noted that the MLA is trying harder, though its enormous size is a considerable hindrance. There is “more and more activity,” he acknowledges, but the organization is slow and lumbering, like “a big elephant.” American Studies Association. While many interviewees believe that the MLA is curiously missing in action, they note substantial participation from another ACLS member, the American Studies Association (ASA). ASA is a major sponsor of The Visible Knowledge Project, a large-scale, five-year collaboration (discussed more fully in the Teaching Applications, section 3.6) that “aims to improve the quality of college and university teaching by focusing on both student learning and faculty development in technology-enhanced environments.” ASA's Web site features communities based around the curriculum, technology and learning, and reference and research. Its flagship journal American Quarterly (AQ) has recently launched a new Web site, providing online access to its contents. Under a heading labeled “New Forms of Writing,” the AQ solicits “proposals for and submissions of visual essays and essays that include hyperlink and online supplements, such as video and audio clips, additional images, [and] links to online sources for key archival information. . . . As we continue to build our Web site,” it advises, “we are interested in proposals for essays and reviews that can be published online.” In addition to regular reviews of exhibitions, “the American Quarterly is open to proposals for reviews of other cultural forms that are of interest to American studies scholars, including reviews of films, television shows, web sites, and CDs.” Recently, the AQ has called for papers to be published in a special issue (September 2006) entitled “Rewiring the Nation: The Place of Technology in American Studies.” American Literature Association. The American Literature Association (ALA), according to its founder and Executive Board member, James Nagel (University of Georgia), is a “no-budget operation” that charges no dues and wants none. It serves its 10,000 members as an umbrella organization for almost 150 author societies and coordinates the meeting space for the annual conferences of these societies, which are held simultaneously. ALA does not publish its own scholarly journal; hence, it does not meet one of the key criteria for membership in the ACLS. Many or most of the author societies, while low-budget operations, do publish journals and maintain Web sites that are a rich source of information about American writers. ALA's Web site features a directory of affiliated societies (in need of updating) and of members. Nagel figures among the most vociferous of those interviewed in denouncing the quality of many online books, calling some efforts a “terrible waste of resources because the books placed online are from corrupt editions rather than from first editions,” rendering them unsuitable for scholarship. Attributing the problem to the “ignorance of the technical people,” he is not alone in decrying the absence of textual integrity or accurate bibliographical information about editions placed online. [11] As one example, Nagel notes that Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises, first published in 1926, was changed in 1934 to expunge anti-Semitic remarks. He also recognizes the huge problem of keeping up with single-author publications, estimating that some 3,500 journals produce some 60,000 articles, and an unknown number of books, about American authors annually. Keeping up with Hemingway alone is a full-time job, with some 600 articles and scores of books published about him annually. Nagel acknowledges that even the projects that he criticizes are exploring the right concepts by making materials more widely accessible. His primary concern is the lack of quality control and the need to coordinate “technical people and scholars.” He has suggested that ALA could help do this in areas such as text selection by identifying a member of each constituent author society to serve as a digital project liaison. Singling out Networked Interface for Nineteenth-Century Electronic Scholarship, or NINES (see 2.5 and 3.3.5.3), as a worthwhile effort, ALA has recently joined this initiative as an affiliated group. [12] Other Professional Organizations. Many other disciplinary and specialized professional associations, with their own journals and conferences, serve the needs of the primary cohort discussed in this report. They include scholarly societies organized by period, movement, or constituent group, such as the Society of Early Americanists, the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism, and the Society for the Study of American Women Writers. This group also embraces various organizations at the intersection of humanities computing and literary studies, including the Society for Textual Scholarship, the Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing, the Association for Computers and the Humanities, the TEI Consortium, the Association for Documentary Editing, and the Electronic Literature Organization. 2.5 Communities of PracticeThe most frequent refrain heard from interviewees was the call for the development of a common agenda — a coming together of scholars, practitioners, publishers, and funding agencies to agree on priorities, standards, best practices, and next steps. One scholar cried out for a “larger sense of community,” along with the “critical space” to see what developments are taking place across a variety of fronts — by different people in different fields: a “clearinghouse” of projects under development would be a start. Another asserted the need for “a more integrated approach by developers and grant agencies.” “Developers,” he continued, “must have the goal to integrate [their technical work] into a national site.” There is a need for “strategic planning” and developing “paths of evolution” among practitioners, scholars, and major granting agencies, he concluded. This theme was echoed by a librarian, frustrated with overlapping and redundant projects, who regrets the lack of coordination. We need to find ways to make the field less fragmentary, he recommended, adding that “throwing money” at the problem is no way to fix it. New models are called for, but what would be most useful: “Why not bring people together to ask?” he wondered. There are communities of practice developing in related fields, for example, the Digital Medievalist Project, established in 2003 “to help scholars meet the increasingly sophisticated demands faced by designers of contemporary digital projects.” [13] In direct support of scholars in nineteenth-century British and American literature, Jerome McGann created NINES, a multifaceted project “to found a publishing environment for integrated, peer-reviewed online scholarship.” NINES is rapidly garnering support from a growing group of affiliates (including the ASA, ALA, and other specialized scholarly societies noted above). In addition to formulating processes for peer-reviewed digital scholarship and creating a publishing environment, NINES is developing analytical tools to support the work of its constituents. The effort as a whole might be construed as an attempt to build a cyberinfrastructure for scholars in nineteenth-century British and American literature. American literary scholars working outside the nineteenth century believe that there is a need for other communities of practice like NINES. 2.6 Tools to the Rescue?An alarming number of digital projects aimed at the discovery of American literature are maintained by professionals as a labor of love. In particular, those devotees creating gateways and access to online books — Voice of the Shuttle (VoS), Literary Resources on the Net, Alex: Catalogue of Electronic Texts, the Online Books Page, A Celebration of Women Writers — continue their work as a service to the profession, assuredly not because it will lead to fame, fortune, promotion, or tenure. Rather than “expert enthusiast,” one practitioner preferred to characterize himself as “a lucky person because my vocation is also my avocation.” While that may be the case, without secure funding and full integration to a campus, let alone national, framework, these efforts will last only until the goodwill of their progenitors runs out. Their task was already Sisyphean before Google Print announced its partnership with five prominent research institutions to digitize more than 30 million volumes. Now, it seems truly impossible. [14] Alan Liu's experience as the founder of the award-winning (now desperately behind) VoS is typical. Created when directory-type access to the Web was the norm, VoS initially offered features unavailable even through commercial services, namely, browsable access to annotated scholarly Internet resources situated in a disciplinary and historical framework. However, without a full-fledged technical support staff, VoS suffered a hack attack. The site had to be shut down, and it took three months “to recode the dynamic pages in the background.” If the project is to continue, Liu suggests that it is time to redesign it on a national scale, taking advantage of open-source architecture and having it properly set up with a team of developers across the country. At the same time, he acknowledges that it might be more productive to concentrate instead on developing the “tools” to search and find scholarly information. In the preliminary version of this report, based on interviews with 16 specialists, the term tools rarely came up (aside from Liu), except to acknowledge the need for “better search engines” to find out “how to get to these things.” Not surprisingly, therefore, when an expert group of faculty, convened by DLF in June 2004, avowed the “severe need for tools customized for a range of scholarly inquiry needs,” the federation discovered that “so unfamiliar is this area that we heard from several individuals that they had a hard time articulating precisely what they required from such tools, or what level of software creation skills or consultancy is available to them, and where.” Concluding, “we are still in a stage where it is easier to react to an example of an existing tool than to dream them up,” DLF decided instead to discuss and demonstrate a variety of software packages (Digital Library Federation 2004a). Leading theoreticians such as Unsworth and McGann, who traverse the boundaries of humanities computing and literary scholarship, believe that a real breakthrough in digital scholarship hinges on building open, modular, extensible, and reusable tools. [15] These tools must be readily accessible and relatively easy to use and, above all, enable important work, such as literary analysis and interpretation. In reviewing progress over the past 10 years in humanities computing and articulating what would be required to make the necessary leap forward, Unsworth states: Building these tools will answer or moot many of the questions we've been discussing . . . and will shift the burden of proof, in effect, from the new modes of scholarship to traditional ones: if we build tools that do allow us to ask new questions and answer old ones, then it will be clear why we have built our digital libraries, and in the disciplines, we will worry about what hasn't changed in scholarly methodology, and not about what has (Unsworth 2003). What purposes would these tools serve for literary scholars? Unsworth (2000a) identifies six “basic functions common to scholarly activity across disciplines, over time, and independent of theoretical orientation.” He refers to them as “scholarly primitives.” They are as follows:
2.6.1 Tool Projects Under WayUnfortunately, there is no “tools center” to serve literary scholars as does the Echo site for history. A few of the more notable projects (externally supported national collaboratives), geared toward literature, are offered as a starting point for further exploration. NINES tools are designed to support six basic scholarly tasks while opening rich digital archives and research collections to the interpretive interests of teachers and students. The six tasks (arranging, comparing, transforming, discussing, commenting on, and collecting texts and images) are addressed in a variety of ways by the tool set and by the markup schemes and interfaces NINES supports. These data models and tools are in various stages of development: [16]
The NORA project will produce software for discovering, visualizing, and exploring significant patterns across large collections of full-text humanities resources in existing digital libraries and collections. [17] “In search-and-retrieval,” Unsworth says, “we pose specific queries and get back answers to those queries; by contrast, the goal of data-mining is to produce new knowledge by exposing unanticipated patterns. Over the past decade, many millions of dollars have been invested in creating digital library collections: the software tools we'll produce in this project will make those collections significantly more useful for research and teaching.” NORA's initial content domain consists of about 5 gigabytes of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British and American literary texts (about 10,000), including
National Institute for Technology and Liberal Education (NITLE) Semantic Engine is designed to address the universal problem of accessing and organizing large amounts of unstructured digital text. Using mathematical algorithms to index the latent semantic content of documents, the prototype engine has been demonstrated to reduce drastically, if not eliminate, the need for expensive and time-consuming metadata tagging and to produce results superior to those produced by keyword searches in limited test domains. [18] DLF Aquifer (see section 3.5.3.1) is a collaborative effort among a dozen DLF members to develop a test-bed of library tools and services for the scholar. Intended to realize the potential of a distributed open digital library, it will initially focus on American culture and life, drawing on quality content from such projects as the American South, the American West, American Memory, Making of America, and Wright American Fiction. DLF Aquifer will provide tools and services for aggregating and distributing content by interoperating with
DLF Aquifer will siphon content from mass-digitization projects. [19] Participating institutions are expected to adhere to consensually developed standards, information architectures, and development agendas that emphasize interoperability and deep resource sharing. 2.7 What's Not to Like?Scholars of American literature readily recognize certain benefits that digital resources offer. Few would argue about their democratizing impact, making widely available, high-quality (“vetted, not random”) digital surrogates on the Web, giving scholars and their students immediate access to primary sources worldwide. All revel in the way in which online access facilitates searching so that users can identify research patterns with “blinding speed.” “Searchability of primary source material has been fun,” as one scholar put it. It facilitates reading that is (in a positive way) “broad and shallow” — covering vast amounts of digital text and making intellectual connections that were previously impractical, if not impossible. They acknowledge the advantages of online access to peer-reviewed journals through reliable aggregators such as JSTOR. Scholars also appreciate the ability of Internet-accessible resources “to foreground” scholarly work. The Web is a starting point that helps situate literary texts in their cultural, sociopolitical, and historical contexts. But here the consensus comes to a halt. Few are willing to use digital texts (outside e-journal articles) as the “text of record for a scholarly article” — even those digital resources (texts and archives) produced by their peers, by university libraries, or by otherwise credible publishers. The obstacles to more-rapid deployment of digital resources in American literature are peppered throughout this report. Three have been highlighted: the absence of a prominent scholarly organization to lead from above and advocate a shared agenda among stakeholders; the need for more communities of practice; and the present state of (not-quite-ready-for-prime time) analytical and interpretative tools. Five more barriers stand clearly visible:
2.7.1 Insufficient Peer-Review ProcessesMany have reported on the plight of the research monograph — dying with or without cause — and its traditional centrality to the promotion and tenure process (Chodorow 1997, Greenblatt 2002, Davidson 2003 and 2004, Estabrook and Warner 2003, Unsworth 2005). Meanwhile, in a recent survey of promotion-and-tenure practices in humanities departments, Cronin and LaBarre (2004) report "coming away from the data with the clear sense that granting of tenure in humanities departments still requires the production of a research monograph published by a reputable press. Sole authorship is expected,” they continue, “and the documents we examined are virtually silent on the issue of collaboration and co-authorship . . .” (increasingly the norm in many other disciplines and a frequent feature of serious digital work). Cronin and LaBarre further note that A few institutions acknowledged the acceptability of online, electronic, and digital forms of scholarly production, but most were content to stress the importance of a candidate's work being subjected to peer review while remaining silent on the matter of medium. Overall, new modes of scholarly production and distribution received hardly any direct attention (Cronin and LaBarre 2004, 97). It will be interesting to learn whether the MLA's promotion-and-tenure survey reveals more-nuanced or more-refined norms to accommodate new sorts of scholarship. There is a divergence of opinion among faculty members interviewed for this report about the impact of digital scholarship on the promotion-and-tenure process. Many forms of digital scholarship appear without peer review. One scholar observed that some forms of digital peer review already occur but that there is no public record of scholarly transactions when they assess the digital work of their colleagues going up for promotion and tenure, serve as references for new digital scholars in the job market, or evaluate grant proposals in support of digital projects (e.g., by the National Endowment for the Humanities). In the field of history, there is evidence that digital work counts — Ayers tells the “bittersweet” story of William Thomas's success in gaining tenure at the University of Virginia on the basis of his digital scholarly work, only to be snapped up by the University of Nebraska. Individuals with freshly minted Ph.D. degrees in history whose work is featured in Gutenberg-e have secured tenure-track positions across the country. And in the opinion of at least one senior American literature scholar, the promotion-and-tenure issue is grossly exaggerated — the 25 top-tier research institutions may ignore digital scholarship, he contends, but every place else sees it as a definite advantage. Although many forms of digital scholarship appear without formal peer review, such mechanisms are starting to emerge. Peer-reviewed articles are appearing in leading journals indexed by the MLA's International Bibliography such as Postmodern Culture, Americana: The Journal of American Popular Culture, and Early Modern Literary Studies. MLA's adoption of new guidelines for vetting electronic scholarly editions paves the way for digital editions to receive the imprimatur of “CSE-approved editions.” NINES also sets out an ambitious agenda that includes creating peer-review processes. Finally, as more university presses initiate electronic imprints, such as the University of Virginia's Rotunda collections, peer review will become more widespread. The development of formal peer-review mechanisms for digital scholarship will begin to address the concerns of scholars who remain skeptical about the quality of the digital text or the scholar's contribution to knowledge. Fearing that many forms of digital output are merely a way “to outsource the crisis in scholarly publishing to faculty and call it scholarship,” one critic, while understanding “the labor of editorial selection or annotating a text as scholarship,” stressed the importance of peer review “if a digital work is to be recognized as the archive of record.” As the peer-review system is further developed, it will bring to the forefront debates about the value of digital scholarship and eventually help delineate what does or does not constitute bona fide scholarship in the digital world. 2.7.2 Absence of Trusted Mechanisms to Sustain and Preserve Digital WorkWhen discussing the absence of citations to digital work in the annual review of American Literary Scholarship (AmLS), one contributor (after noting that these resources are not subject to peer review) stated that there was no official editorial policy to prevent their inclusion but suggested that with a limited amount of space to cover traditional scholarship (peer-reviewed journal articles) most are hesitant to discuss a “resource that may go away.” [20] This concern — the ephemeral nature of digital products — resonates with many scholars, who are reluctant, even as they appreciate the myriad advantages, to invest their life's labor into unstable media. The CLIR report New-Model Scholarship: How Will It Survive? addresses these issues more fully (Smith 2003). Carpenter (2005) and Beagrie (2005) discuss digital-preservation activities supported by DLF's U.K. member, the Joint Information Systems Committee. Within the framework of this report, however, it is worth highlighting several initiatives closely tied to scholars of American literature. Preservation, Archiving and Dissemination (PAD) Project, Electronic Literature Organization (ELO). In Acid-Free Bits: Recommendations for Long-Lasting Electronic Literature, the ELO's PAD project is a “plea” to writers of born-digital literature “to work proactively in archiving their own creations, and to bear these issues in mind even in the act of composition,” in the hope that the “creative component does not separate out from the curatorial” (Monfort and Wardrip-Fruin 2004). ELO's 13 principles for creating long-lasting work deserve widespread distribution.
In a forthcoming report, Born-Again Bits: A Framework for Migrating Electronic Literature, the ELO “continues the argument” made in the initial report “by envisioning a technical framework that can not just keep e-lit alive but allow it to come back to life in new forms adapted to evolving technologies and social needs.” More technical in nature, this second report is intended to give stakeholders (broadly defined as “authors, publishers, archivists, academics, programmers, grant officers, and others”) “just enough of a glimpse of each other's expertise to see how an overall system for maintaining and reviving the life of electronic literature might be possible” (Liu et al. beta version, v1.13 September 2004). The University of Virginia Library's Model for Sustaining Digital Scholarship. With several mature projects, including NINES, to consider as models, the University of Virginia Library, in consultation with faculty, is developing an institutional framework to support a full array of digital scholarship services. Its Model for Sustaining Digital Scholarship, currently under discussion, describes the workflow for projects selected by the library once they are camera-ready. As the document explains . . . “camera-ready” means that digital projects must meet (or be made to meet) all technical standards set by the Library. Production, peer review, editing, and rights management are assumed to be the responsibility of the scholar. The project(s) must have been vetted by a credible peer review group or organization and edited by a credible source (Internal UVa library document, SDS Library Model 4.1, November 9, 2004). Although this document is still under development, the components described by the University Library represent the types of policy decisions that all academic libraries will soon confront:
Going a step farther, the University of Virginia Library is also fleshing out seven levels of collecting, represented by associated technical standards for metadata, files, content relationships, and original delivery formats. All seven levels must have fully compliant metadata. However, to qualify for the most stringent category, or level 1, collections must also have fully compliant files, “exact” content relationships, and “exact” original delivery formats. Digital Object Repositories and the DLF Registry of Digital Masters. Only by working through the complex set of issues inherent in sustaining digital scholarship will libraries be able to assure scholars that they have the policies and procedures in place to acquire, organize, make accessible, and sustain their digital output. Digital-object repositories (made possible by Fedora, DSpace, and other software) are an essential component. It is noteworthy that the last question in MLA's revised “Guiding Questions for Vetters of Scholarly Editions” asks Has a copy of the edition and its images, software, style sheets, and documentation been deposited with a library or other long-term digital object repository? (MLA 2005, Part 2 V. 27.4) Although most academic libraries have a long way to go before they can demonstrate to MLA, ELO, and other constituents that they have a trustworthy destination for electronic media of all types, digital repositories like the California Digital Library's eScholarship and the University of Virginia's Fedora infrastructure demonstrate what can be done. The DLF Registry of Digital Masters, maintained by OCLC, is a first coordinated step that institutions may take to signal their intention of preserving and maintaining the accessibility of registered resources over an extended timeframe. The “Record Creation Guidelines” state that This implies that materials are digitized, complying with established standards and best practices, and that they are stored in professionally managed systems. When registered, materials should already be digitized, or be in an active queue for digitization. A use copy (a network-accessible, but not necessarily free, copy) of any material registered must be available on-line to the general public. Where digitally reformatted materials are concerned, reproductions should be of meaningful bibliographic entities (DLF 2004b). 2.7.3 Thorny Issues of Copyright and PermissionsMore than one scholar identified copyright as the biggest obstacle to advancing digital scholarship in American literature, outstripping by far any technological constraints. Copyright restrictions are especially troublesome to twentieth-century projects, which are the subject of a great deal of academic interest. MLA's ”Guiding Questions for Vetters of Scholarly Editions” pose two copyright-related questions.
Case and Green (2004) provide an excellent overview of the issues as they affect electronic editions, giving editors clues about how to investigate copyright and permissions. Typically, authors bear the burden of obtaining permissions. Special collections librarians report that many libraries refuse to make a single copy for authors without proof — in writing — that the owner, agent, or estate executor of the literary property has granted permission. Obtaining such approvals can prove time-consuming, and the results are sometimes inconclusive or subject to dispute. In such situations, scholars may either omit the problematic content or turn to seasoned publishers to help them work through copyright issues. Martha Nell Smith chose to publish Emily Dickinson's Correspondences with the University of Virginia Press's Rotunda electronic imprint not only because she believes it will help to sustain — and lend financial stability to — this edition but also because she can rely on the authority of the press to assist her in negotiating the requisite rights and permissions with its peer agencies (in this case, Harvard University Press). Who owns and controls primary source materials is of paramount importance to digital scholarship, as Unsworth noted several years ago (Unsworth 2000b). And the issues are only becoming more acute as the number of different players — scholars, libraries, publishers, indexers — flourish, accelerating the production of bodies of digital source materials. While the DLF Registry records a “use copy,” thus sparing other libraries the expense of creating a preservation-quality digital master, it does not signal permission for scholars to access or reuse original digital source files. The Million Book Project (MBP) is a source of expertise in the copyright issues surrounding mass-digitization projects and in devising practical workflow issues to address them. Although MBP incorporates “in-copyright” materials and permits online reading, it limits printing and saving to one page at a time. It is too soon to know what practices will emerge among the “Google 5” partners that do include copyrighted books, but if it follows the practices of Google Print, public users will gain access to only a few pages. It is also too soon to know whether or not individual participating institutions will share their source files that have been digitized by Google for scholarly reuse within cooperative frameworks. There is no U.S.-based shared repository, similar to the Oxford Text Archive, where it is possible to request digital source files (see section 3.3.3.2). Interviews with some librarians revealed that such a model may be unlikely to succeed in the United States. “Why should we give away our digital source files to other scholars?” a prominent librarian asked, arguing that they do not want other scholars to manipulate or repurpose texts owned by the library and created through its labor. There are no accepted norms — even in the special collections world, which enjoys a long history of dealing with primary source materials — in providing digital copies or master images derived from library collections or in the fees charged. As discussed later in this report, the metadata associated with the digital resource may embody this rights information (see section 3.5.2). Meanwhile, if The New York Public Library (NYPL) serves as a model, there is a complicated set of questions for authors to consider when using digital images. NYPL “provides free and open access to its Digital Gallery and images may be freely downloaded for personal, research and study purposes only.” However, “if images are to be used in any nonprofit or commercial publication, broadcast, web site, exhibition, promotional material, etc.,” the library charges a usage fee — as the physical rights holder of this material even though most of the images are in the public domain for copyright purposes. The use of images is governed by a licensing agreement: Images are not to be used in any manner without the expressed written permission from NYPL. All images are licensed under the terms and conditions as specified in this Agreement and in the written Permissions statement you will receive. No image licenses are valid until NYPL has received payment in full. Image usage without prior payment and NYPL's expressed written permission is strictly prohibited. (NYPL Photographic Services and Permissions, Terms and Conditions, available at http://www.nypl.org/permissions/terms.html.) The usage fee, NYPL explains, “is not a copyright fee,” but helps “ensure that the Library is able to continue to acquire, preserve, and provide access to the accumulated knowledge of the world.” It further advises inquirers that they are free to obtain a copy of the requested images from another source, should they so choose. The NYPL's Photographic Services and Permissions FAQ service answers a host of other questions on such matters as the basis for the fee structure, whether the library will reproduce images still in copyright, whether the library's fee still applies when the author also pays a fee to the third-party copyright holder, whether the fees posted on the Use Fee Schedule apply when the author has already paid for a reproduction or downloaded a low-resolution image directly from the Web site, whether a user may link directly to the NYPL Digital Gallery, and so forth. [21] Given the current state of flux — and the specter of complicated, expensive, or frozen access — the Text Creation Partnership (TCP), headquartered at the University of Michigan University Library, stands out as the only wide-scale initiative aimed at releasing digital master files from proprietary control to unfettered use by its members — and by extension, quite possibly to the public at large. Scholars of stature, such as Martin Mueller, professor of classics and English at Northwestern University, recognize “how important it is to maintain a conversation about how to create and manage sharable sets of our primary textual materials” and urges his colleagues in English departments to take a lesson from scientists and “make the creation of such data sets a partial but integral part of our scholarly lives” (Mueller 2004). The University of Michigan is already granting partner institutions the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to use TCP content, subject to the terms and conditions set forth in a formal TCP Local Management Agreement. 2.7.4 Paucity of Sustainable Business ModelsVirtually everyone interviewed in this report raised concerns about the high cost of large-scale digital efforts. Publishers and librarians alike look to models such as the TCP as the only economically viable way to produce high-quality, thoroughly edited and encoded texts. Even this public-private cooperative, which hinges on purchasing the corpora first, is beyond the reach of many academic libraries. What will become of graduate students, their faculty mentors wonder, when they leave well-endowed research institutions to teach at places that do not have access to a full spectrum of electronic resources? Is the digital world — with its laudable democratizing potential — really ushering in a new era of haves and have-nots? What can be done to ensure more-equitable access? This report offers no easy answers; it only calls for further investigation into this question. Constituents look to DLF to advocate for new models and support TCP-like efforts. Many of the projects under review here initially relied on grant funding, and if fortunate, the host institution will bear the continuing cost or developers must devise alternative means to gain revenue, including licensing their product. The costs of major digital projects are not insignificant. To cite two examples: The Wright American Fiction project, which is not the beneficiary of external funds, will cost participating Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) members an estimated $475,000 for about 3,000 fully encoded books. Meanwhile, the production costs for the 30 books expected to be published as part of the grant-funded Gutenberg-e project are estimated at an astonishing average of "slightly under $60,000 per book" (Manning 2004, footnotes 30 and 31). It is no wonder, then, that there has been growth in the number of hybrid access sites, where the general public is provided access to a subset of materials with full service restricted to constituent communities paying fees. The shift from ownership of content to rental or licensing by contract, which is now affecting all disciplines, is one of the key strategic issues in digital asset management, according to Donald Waters, scholarly communications program officer at The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. He states, “The shift to electronic publication in its current form represents a dramatic, jump-off-the-cliff shift in the academy from owning scholarly output to renting it.” He continues: A growing number of senior officers of our colleges and universities — presidents, provosts, and chief financial officers — are beginning to question the huge risk to the future of their institution's core operations because of the growing dependence on the record of scholarship for which the institution is paying substantial sums but on which it has no real claim (Waters 2005). Institutional digital repositories are envisioned as one component in regaining control and ownership of faculty output, but they, too, are created at considerable expense. Moreover, the concept is a hard sell to many faculty members whose disciplinary allegiance is national rather than local. From the perspective of one disgruntled scholar — who undoubtedly reflects the opinion of many others — the very notion that “every department would publish itself” is a flawed concept. No one is interested in a particular institution's production “outside the context of a discipline,” she asserted. Calling it a “nightmare” and “dumb to spend $300,000 to put everything on the Web,” this humanist asked, “Why put preliminary work on the Web? Doesn't a published article reflect well upon the institution?” Such questions show the need in the field of American literature for coordinated strategic planning among professional organizations, scholars, librarians, publishers, and funding agencies. 2.7.5 Dearth of SpecialistsMany of the faculty members interviewed for this report affirmed the need for more specialists who have grounding in the discipline along with knowledge of new technologies. The Association for Literary and Linguistic Computing's regularly updated taxonomy of “Institutional Models for Humanities Computing,” edited by Willard McCarty (King's College, London) and Matthew Kirschenbaum (University of Maryland), gives readers an idea of the types of teaching, research, and technology support structures available to humanists at institutions in the United States and Western Europe. Scholars such as Alan Liu expressed concern about the concentration of expertise in text-encoding and markup-based humanities computing work (starting with the creation of digital text archives but now encompassing othe |
