0.22 Rotunda: a university press starts a digital imprint  (Page 13/15)

A model of sustainability that involves multiple sources of revenue appears to fall very much in line with thinking about sustainability going on at foundations such as Mellon. As projects that were incubated with Mellon funds face the end of grants that supported operations, Mellon and other foundations have received a large number of maintenance grant requests in addition to proposals for new initiatives, a situation that is in itself unsustainable. An excellent white paper on this issue is available from Ithaka. (External Link)

Some lessons learned

All of us who have worked on the development of Rotunda came from a background either in book publishing or programming. Some of the things that surprised us may be well known to journals publishers and librarians, but not to these novices from the world of print.

Negotiations

In a university press book publishing program, the work of acquiringnew projects is usually handled by acquisitions editors and sometimes by the director. In Rotunda’s first phase (exclusivelyoriginal digital projects), acquisitions work was handled by the manager of Rotunda. When Rotunda shifted its publishing goals toinclude the digitization of ongoing documentary editions, I began to serve as acquiring editor for Rotunda projects. TheFounding Fathers’ Papers were such prestigious works that negotiation for rights was started at the director level whenpublishers held the rights. Some of the negotiations involved meeting in person while others could be conducted by phone andemail, since I was personally acquainted with all the other university press directors. Usually we took the initiative toask for electronic rights, but as Rotunda has become better known, documentary editors and press directors are suggestingprojects to us to include in our collections. We also needed to develop new contractual agreements for the licenses withpublishers and for the license agreements with libraries.

Scale

We were surprised at the scale necessary to make a successful electronic publishing program. To a bookpublisher, a work of eight hundred pages or an edition with six hundred documents is a significant undertaking. To a library, adigital publication of that size is hardly large enough to be worth the transaction cost of making a separate licenseagreement with a publisher. We thought that The Papers of George Washington with its fifty-two published volumes, totaling 29,400 pages, was a massive undertaking, but it fell below the minimumannual volume for new projects required by at least one digital conversion vendor. Fortunately, librarians regarded the digitaledition of the Washington Papers as a significant accomplishment, but they were also very interested in having the papers aggregatedand made cross-searchable with other editions of the period. Larger collections commanded more serious consideration by librarystaff.

Importance of “branding” and design

As the electronic imprint got underway, there were many intense discussions about what to call it. For a while it was just called “Electronic Imprint” or “EI,” but our marketing director, Mark Saunders, who later became manager of Rotunda, insisted on a more distinctive name. We adopted the name Rotunda for its obvious association with the graceful building designed by Thomas Jefferson at the University of Virginia as a library for the new university. We felt that our digital collections could be embraced under the domed roof of this virtual Rotunda. We hired a talented designer to create the logo. We believe that the Rotunda name has been important in establishing an identity for the fledgling imprint. Since Rotunda is mentioned in publicity and every review of the individual publications, the name provides a useful shorthand for librarians and scholars.