0.22 Rotunda: a university press starts a digital imprint  (Page 10/15)

How rotunda affected our traditional publishing program

Because Rotunda was initiated with grant funding, we segregated its finances from the Press’s regular book publishing program. The Imprint is also in a separate location. Over the decade of Rotunda’s existence the technical and the traditional aspects of our program have grown closer together, and the staff members of both teams constantly share their expertise, particularly in the areas of database management, XML coding, and workflow design.

Work on the digital editions led us into discussions with the editor of the Washington Papers and his staff on the workflow for future volumes. The editorial office of the Papers has purchased a content management system and will develop future volumes in this system, allowing their editors to deliver well-tagged XML files to the Press for publication of both print and digital editions. We expect this new procedure to be of great benefit and that it will help the accuracy and speed of the publication process.

Rotunda’s focus on scholarly editions brought us into regular contact with members of the Association for Documentary Editing. We have become the publisher of several new or existing documentary editions since Rotunda was established, with the expectation that many of these works could be incorporated in Rotunda after the print editions are published. These editions are The Papers of Abraham Lincoln: Legal Documents and Cases (2008, four volumes); The Eleanor Roosevelt Papers (Vol. 1, Fall 2009, reprinted from the Scribner edition; five volumes planned); The Selected Papers of John Jay (Vol. 1, Spring 10; seven volumes planned); The Diaries of Gouverneur Morris: European Travels, 1794-1798 (Fall 2010, one volume). We will also be publishing another born-digital edition, The Lyndon B. Johnson Digital Edition , for the Presidential Recordings project of the Miller Center at the University of Virginia, as the first work in a new twentieth-century collection, The American Century.

What other university presses are doing with digital scholarly editions

Librarians acquiring electronic resources are well aware of the ever-expanding number of electronic resources available from publishers and other sources. Several large commercial publishers such as Cengage, which now includes Gale, dominate the field with expensive large collections. Smaller electronic publishers such as Alexander Street Press have created valuable digital collections in the humanities and social sciences. For the most part, though, scholarly editions are published by the university presses, and only a few such editions have made a transition to digital publication.

In the university press world, the two great British university presses, Oxford and Cambridge, have been pioneers in digital publishing. Oxford in particular has developed digital editions of many of its signature reference works, such as the Oxford English Dictionary and the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography . (External Link) More recently, Oxford has taken on distribution of the Electronic Enlightenment, another Mellon-funded project that incorporates British and European editions of correspondence from the long eighteenth century as well as some American materials. Rotunda’s American Founding Era collection is a sister project that now incorporates about the same number of documents as the Electronic Enlightenment with little or no overlap. Since both projects have been created using XML tagging, there is a tantalizing prospect that they might one day be able to interact with one another should it be possible to resolve all the rights questions that had to be addressed in the creation of both resources.