Wednesday, July 25, 2001

LOGGING IN WITH . . . Eileen Gardiner and Ronald G. Musto 2 Former Professors Look to Technology to Bolster Scholarly Presses' History Offerings By GOLDIE BLUMENSTYK Move over, Stephen King. Historians are creating e-books, too. The History E-Book Project, an effort of the American Council of Learned Societies, is a way for scholarly publishers to experiment with electronic technology. The project is supported with a $3-million grant from the Andrew Mellon Foundation. The project is headed by the husband-and-wife team of Ronald G. Musto and Eileen Gardiner, both former college professors -- he in history, she in medieval literature. They are the founders of a small publishing company in New York City called Italica Press. Q. How many books have you commissioned so far? Ms. Gardiner: It's a combination of two things: Five hundred backlist books that we're putting up online and also 85 new books. We're not really commissioning things. We're working with the university presses to identify titles that they have under contract which have electronic possibilities. Q. So this is something that combines the values of a really robust Web site and a scholarly book, all in one product? Ms. Gardiner: Yes. It will aimed particularly at upper-level undergraduate students, and graduate students, and scholars of history. These will be books that will be of interest to professional historians. Q. How will people get to these? Will they be on a Web site? Do users have to pay for them? Ms. Gardiner: They will be on a Web site hosted by the [University of Michigan] Digital Library Production Service. The access initially will be through library subscriptions. Mr. Musto: With site licenses for the entire campus. And really inexpensive. They range from about $300 for very small campuses to about $1,300 for very large research universities. Our goal is to price it inexpensively to reach as broad a library market as possible. Q. I can see how this would be a good model for publishers in that you will be establishing some technical standards for electronic publication. But since you're getting a grant to develop these products, is it actually a realistic business model? Ms. Gardiner: The grant only lasts for five years. July 1 [was the start of] our third year. We expect to be self-sufficient by the beginning of year five. So although we had start-up money, it was a very modest grant of $3-million, and we see that we'll be able to perpetuate the project after the initial grant runs out. Q. What do you look for in a book that will make it a good e-history book? Can you give some examples? Mr. Musto: One of the big ones is the Robert Darnton project. What he's working on is [a book about] the book-publishing industry in France before the revolution. What he's doing for us [with Oxford University Press] is a new book that traces the career of one book traveler who smuggles books from Protestant Switzerland to Catholic France before the revolution, tracing his sales, the kinds of books he imported. Q. How does that book lend itself to electronic enhancements? Mr. Musto: It has several levels. First of all, there is straight narrative, which is one of the goals of this project -- to do the same thing that the old history monograph did, give both a straight narrative and an analysis. On another level, what he does is give access to source documents, with hyperlinks right into the documents themselves. Q. What about an example of high-end book? Mr. Musto: High-end? We've got a book by Paul Edwards which is going to be published by M.I.T. Press. This is a book on the history of weather mapping. This includes not only the discipline itself -- the notion of tracing the historical development of the study of weather patterns -- but it also includes, much more broadly, things like geopolitics and what gets included when one studies things like global warming, and why and why not. So there's your straight historical narrative with analysis. But here you're going to have things like extensive mapping, video of weather patterns, color-coded maps of global warming. Q. Your arrangements with the presses guarantee you exclusive rights to the electronic enhancements that you create for your Web site. You are also allowing the presses latitude to reformat and use some of that material in products that they might develop, such as CD-ROMs. Are you being deliberately loose about the rights to this material? Ms. Gardiner: This was essentially a project to help the presses get up and running with electronic publication, so we're not in this to make unreasonable demands on the presses. It's supposed to be a cooperative venture. Q. Is the idea to eventually get the presses to be selling their own Web-enhanced books? Ms. Gardiner: That's a possibility. The other possibility is that they may find that the best way of doing that is through a kind of Web site like the History E-Book Project. In many ways we're feeling our way along with the presses to figure this out. We're not trying to drive a hard-nosed bargain with the presses. We're in this to help them and also to help historians to use this new technology to be able to create an interesting new history. Easy-to-print version E-mail this article

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