Ever since my days (1986-1997) at the American Council of Learned Societies I have been interested in system of scholarly communication in the humanities. The “system” used to be thought of as the triangular relationship between scholars, librarians, and academic publishers. My predecessor at ACLS, the late Bill Ward, had secured a grant from the Mellon Foundation to establish an Office of Scholarly Communications and Technology in Washington, D.C. with the thought of thinking through the implications of the twin revolutions in telecommunications and computing for humanities scholarship.
It was a prescient notion, but it turned out to be premature, for humanities scholars in those days were just beginning to use word processing and few had discovered e-mail, much less the scholarly applications of computing. So we were forced to shut the office down, with a promise that ACLS would not forget its commitment to improving scholarly communications. We later helped (along with the Getty Trust and the Coalition for Networked Information) form the National Initiative for Networked Communication in the Humanities, which accomplished a good deal before running out of funding — and now the “system” was expanded to include museums, computer scientists and other players. After I left ACLS, it sponsored an important project on the cyberinfrastructure for the humanities, as the range and complexity of the digital humanities continued to expand. I suppose one sign of how far we have come in the past quarter century is the recent emergence of an NEH grant program in the digital humanities.
Last Thursday I drove to State College, Pennsylvania to give a talk to a group of librarians, publishers and scholars on “Humanities Publication in the Age of Google.” Penn State has one of the most ably led university research libraries under the deanship of Nancy Eaton, and a press (which is actually part of the Library at Penn State) similarly blessed under the direction of Sandy Thacher. For me it was preaching to the choir, but that is occasionally good for the soul. I talked about the progress of digital research and publication in the humanities, about the bearing of the law of intellectual property on what humanities scholars, libraries, and publishers can and cannot do since the Digital Millennium Copyright Act of 1998, about changes in research libraries as the result of the growth of digital scholarly resources — and about the implications of the Google Settlement on strategies for libraries and publishers.
I will come back to these topics in subsequent posts, but what I want to stress today is my sense that the crucial change required to make the digital humanities revolution work for scholars is the continued transformation of the research library, which I believe is the best site for collaborative interaction between scholars, library technologists, and communicator-publishers. The challenge is to work together across formal barriers to achieve our common goals — once we articulate them.
