2016 Charleston Library Conference

Scholars in the digital humanities produce work that breaks the constraints of the printed page--the monograph's traditional form--and University Presses and University Libraries are adapting their practices to meet the changing publication needs of these scholars and their research. Encouraged by the Mellon Foundation, in particular, Presses and Libraries are experimenting with various ways to meet the needs of these scholars. Anthony Watkinson, Honorary Lecturer in the Department of Information Studies at University College London will set the scene. Rebecca Welzenbach, Director of Strategic Integration and Partnerships at Michigan Publishing, will describe efforts underway at Michigan Publishing to ensure that new forms of digital scholarship are discoverable, durable, and recognizable as high-quality scholarship alongside more traditional products, focusing on initiatives including Lever Press, the Mellon-funded Fulcrum publishing platform, and the Mellon-funded Mapping the Free eBook Supply Chain research project. Susan Doerr, Assistant Director and Digital Publishing and Operations Director at the University of Minnesota Press, will turn our perspective inside a university press with a discussion of Minnesota's efforts, in collaboration with CUNY's Graduate Center Digital Scholarship Lab, to makes visible the process of a book's creation though Manifold, a Mellon-funded iterative publishing platform that seeks to transform monographs from static print forms into web-based dynamic digital publications. Our intention is to reach out to publishers and librarians in the context of considerable international interest, for example in UNESCO, in recognising the validity of non-traditional scholarly outputs. It is an area where these speakers and their institutions are at the cutting edge.