Tuesday, July 20, 1999

Columbia U. Plans a New-Media Unit Devoted to Scholarly Publishing By FLORENCE OLSEN New York Columbia University plans to create a new institution -- one it says will be uniquely suited to Internet publishing -- by bringing scholarly publishers, librarians, and technologists from all around its campus together in a New Media Center for Electronic Publishing. "We're not trying here to duplicate print publications by just putting them on line," says the editor in chief of Columbia University Press. Columbia has experimented with on-line publishing projects for the past five years, says Kate Wittenberg, editor in chief of Columbia University Press. But she says securing space for a new-media center -- then staffing it with programmers, research librarians, and editors -- is necessary if the projects are to succeed. The new center will open in September. On-line publishing currently generates only 1 per cent of the university's scholarly-publishing income, but it has been growing at a rate of one major project a year, Ms. Wittenberg says. The media center will select and link various working papers, lectures, conference proceedings, books, journals, and data bases in a particular field, and then publish them on a single World-Wide Web site, she says. Sharing the same physical space will create the interdisciplinary communication on which new-media publishing depends, Ms. Wittenberg says. "We're not trying here to duplicate print publications by just putting them on line," she says. "We have to speak each other's language." A second digital-media center on the Columbia campus supports new teaching and learning methods by helping professors convert their course materials to a digital format for publication on the Web. But the new center, which will be located in Columbia's 65-year-old Butler Library, is unique in the history of the university, Ms. Wittenberg says. The first three publishing projects that the center will manage are already under way. The oldest of these is Columbia International Affairs Online. The Web site has full-text working papers from 92 contributing institutions, 40,000 pages of conference proceedings, books, abstracts from leading international-affairs journals, and government statistics about such international issues as technology policy, free-trade zones, NATO expansion, and the role of the United Nations. The international-affairs site, launched in 1997, grows at a rate of 2,000 pages a month, Ms. Wittenberg says. Columbia Earthscape, a newer site that is still undergoing testing, brings together curricular materials, data bases, and scholarly research in environmental science. Financed by a one-year, $150,000 start-up grant from the university provost's office, Earthscape will officially open as a subscription site in December, after making its debut at the fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union. The university has applied to the National Science Foundation for a grant to finance the project while it builds a subscriber base. A third new-media project, not yet completed, is the American Historical Association Electronic Book Prize Project. With $300,000 from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Columbia will publish electronic monographs in several "endangered" history fields to help keep them alive, Ms. Wittenberg says. A.H.A. officials will announce the prize-winning dissertations for the project at the association's annual meeting, in January. University officials expect both the New Media Center itself and each of the electronic-publishing projects it manages to become self-supporting within three years. Two years after its launch, Columbia International Affairs Online is close to breaking even, Ms. Wittenberg says. Its 175 subscribers each pay $595 to $1,200 a year, depending on the number of users per subscription. In addition to overseeing those and future publishing projects, the media center will conduct research in electronic publishing, a field about which much is still unknown, she says. "When you get a group of scholars talking to each other around a table into a tape recorder about how they do their research and teaching, that's when you really begin to understand the potential of the on-line environment," says Ms. Wittenberg. Scholars want "better-selected content" and want to be more productive as scholars, she adds. "There's too much junk out there." The new center will offer "an opportunity to learn more about how scholars, scientists, and students use this kind of information," says Elaine Sloan, vice-president for information services and university librarian at Columbia. But providing information digitally creates some additional costs for university publishers -- and scholars. Among electronic publishing's many requirements, Ms. Wittenberg says, are high-speed-network connections, search engines, password and authentication security, and on-line peer review -- none of which are features of traditional print publishing. Columbia University is in the midst of a four-year, $7.7-million project to upgrade its Morningside Heights campus network, which links 17,000 computers in more than 100 buildings. The upgrade will create a shared gigabit backbone and 10-megabit connections to each desktop computer on the campus. Background stories from The Chronicle: Award Will Put Winning History Monographs on the Web (1/22/99) Opinion: Cutting-Edge Scholarship and Electronic Publishing (6/19/98) Academic Presses Look to the Internet to Save Scholarly Monographs (9/12/97) Scholarly Press and Political-Science Group to Post Papers on Line (9/5/97)