0.22 Rotunda: a university press starts a digital imprint  (Page 2/15)

The Press’s electronic imprint got underway in 2002 when the imprint was fully staffed with a team of five people, including a manager, managing editor, and technical staff. I had recently joined the UVa Press as director. The imprint, soon to be named Rotunda, aimed to combine the originality, intellectual rigor, and scholarly value of traditional peer-reviewed university press publishing with thoughtful technological innovation. To get the work started, the imprint’s first manager, Mick Gusinde-Duffy, visited centers for advanced technology and attended many academic, publishing, and technology meetings to spread word of the imprint’s existence and to seek out promising projects. In that early period, Rotunda considered sixteen born-digital projects, and four of them advanced far enough through the review process to be approved for advance contracts by the Press board. Three of those original projects have now been published by Rotunda: Holly Shulman’s The Dolley Madison Digital Edition (2004), John Bryant’s Herman Melville’s Typee: A Fluid Text Edition (2007) , and Martha Nell Smith’s Emily Dickinson’s Correspondence: A Born-Digital Textual Inquiry (2009) . Of the other projects considered in the first two years, some were never submitted for publication, and others were published elsewhere as open access projects at the project director’s institution, or on CD-ROM from a commercial publisher. We discovered that one of the problems with developing a program of exclusively born-digital projects was that these projects took years to develop since their own funding was often insecure.

In the first years of Rotunda’s existence, we decided to concentrate on text-based projects rather than multimedia projects. We wanted to develop a computing platform and programming expertise in a focused area, and we anticipated that the additional rights issues associated with multimedia would be a potential distraction. David Sewell, the editorial and technical manager of Rotunda, wrote in one of his first reports:

From the beginning it was assumed that the Electronic Imprint would be as scrupulous as possible in adhering to international standards for Web publication, graphics formats, metadata, and so on. In principle, this meant that publications would be acceptable so long as they were created in Extensible Markup Language (XML) or in XHTML (the XML-compliant version of HTML) valid per the recommendations of the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C), and employed nonproprietary formats for multimedia and programming wherever possible. In practice, it has become clear to us this year that a sustainable program of digital publications will require that diverse projects be as uniform as possible in their underlying technology, to minimize the amount of developmental work required of the publisher. To this end we have begun developing best practices recommendations for authors, and our 2003 collaboration with Jerome McGann’s NINES project was based on a shared interest in establishing uniformity of input for online publication.