Content Tagged Book Channel Cross Post

This article seeks to understand information behavior in the context of the academic e-book user experience, shaped by a disparate set of vendor platforms licensed by libraries.

An interesting post by Mark Edington, "founding director of the Amherst College Press and the publisher of Lever Press, two initiatives to build a pathway for peer-reviewed, digitally native scholarship from a liberal arts perspective through a platinum open access model."

Samuel Cohen, an  associate professor of English at the University of Missouri, writes about the challenges of scholarly publishing in the Chronicle of Higher Education (April 22, 2018): "When university presses close, so do our minds."

"[University College of London Press], the University of Michigan Press, the University of California Press and Cornell University Press recently collaborated with Knowledge Unlatched Research to look at how people who downloaded OA books from the digital library JSTOR used them... Most of the OA books reviewed in the study were in the social sciences..."

Charles Watkinson writes about Fulcrum, the University of Michigan Press's new reading platform. Newly launched is "A Mid-Republican House from Gabii ...an archaeological site report with a difference. Not only can users access all the associated data from the excavated building, but they can explore it through an interactive 3D model as well as a narrative text."

New article of interest about ScholarlyHub:

April Hathcock and Guy Geltner, "Clearing the Garden: ScholarlyHub as a New Non-profit Digital Commons, Insights, 31 no. 6 (2018). DOI: http://doi.org/10.1629/uksg.398 https://insights.uksg.org/articles/10.1629/uksg.398/

"Cornell Open is the new global open access portal for classic out-of-print titles from the distinguished catalog of  Cornell University Press. Funded by the newly created Humanities Open Book Program, a collaborative effort between the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, Cornell Open offers for the first time open access to key titles in literary criticism and theory, German studies, and Slavic studies."

KU Research (Knowledge Unlatched) has released a study of Open Access ebook usage on JSTOR.

"Among the findings are that the JSTOR platform accounts for the largest number of referrals to the Open Access ebooks; 34.1% of readers are already on the platform when they access the OA books. Institutions located in the Global South are relatively high users of OA books made available via the JSTOR platform when compared to institutions located in the US, UK, and Western Europe."

Wayne State University Press "has digitized a selection of backlist titles for Open Access distribution... Titles selected for the project fall into several sub-topics that reflect current programs: industrial and labor history, maritime history, Detroit history, Jewish history, Holocaust studies, Israel and Middle East studies, and biographies of significant individuals."

To view the list, visit Wayne Open.

MIT Press has joined forces with the Internet Archive (IA) to scan, preserve, and enable lending of hundreds of the press’s books that are currently unavailable in digital form. With support from British funding agency Arcadia, IA will scan a selection of MIT Press’s backlist titles, which will then be available for any library that owns a physical copy of each book to lend or make openly available, and will also be accessible through IA’s archive.org.

Trevor Owens has posted on his blog the draft of his forthcoming book, The Theory and Craft of Digital Preservation: An Introduction (to be published by Johns Hopkins University Press). 

See the introduction and conclusion, and the table of contents.

No Shelf Required has a series of  Free Content Alerts, which highlights sites and platforms where ebooks and econtent may be downloaded and read for free. So far they have recommended 10 great sites for "anyone looking for quality content online in digital format".

See Ten sites that give free access to quality ebooks librarians and publishers should know about [readers, too]

"The March 2017 issue of Perspectives on History featured a piece by Seth Denbo, the AHA’s director of scholarly communication and digital initiatives, on the trend of open-access monographs in humanities fields....

An analysis of the evolution of the Google Book project and its current state:

Scott Rosenberg, "How Google Book Search Got Lost," Backchannel, April 11, 2017, https://backchannel.com/how-google-book-search-got-lost-c2d2cf77121d

Lee Skallerup Bessette briefly reviews a book,  Open: The Philosophy and Practices that are Revolutionizing Education and Science, edited by Rajiv Jhangiani and Robert Biswas-Diener (Ubiquity Press, 2017)

No Shelf Required, the "portal on all things ebooks and digital content," has a new feature on free ebooks. Every Friday, a source of free ebooks online is reviewed.

Source: "Introducing Free Books Alert, a new feature on No Shelf Required", No Shelf Required, January 27, 2017, http://www.noshelfrequired.com/introducing-free-books-alert-a-new-feature-on-nsr/

Alison Muddit writes: "I’m happy to present a selection of our favorite university press reads of 2016 (and thanks to one of our commenters for the suggestion!). We tend to think of university presses as focused primarily on humanities and social science (dare I say esoteric?) monographs and to be sure, a critical part of our mission is to support scholarship from less-funded, smaller and emerging fields.

New book of interest:

Anne Trubek, The History and Uncertain Future of Handwriting (New York: Bloomsbury, 2016)

The book was reviewed by Richard Cox in his blog, Reading Archives and the Academy.

23 university presses that are part of, or report directly to, university libraries met to discuss the benefits and challenges of that arrangement during the P2L Summit and just released a white paper containing recommendations on how to libraries and university presses could collaborate:

The University of Michigan Press/Michigan Publishing announced "the initial beta launch of its Fulcrum publishing platform. In its beta phase, Fulcrum is focused on the presentation of digital source and supplemental materials that cannot be represented adequately in print form. Fulcrum allows for a richer experience and deeper understanding for the reader and enables authors to make better, multi-faceted arguments."

JSTOR has announced a new program to make Open Access monographs available on the JSTOR platform. 63 titles areavailable from the University of California Press, University of Michigan Press, UCL Press, and Cornell University Press. Several hundred more will be added in the next year.

The full list of books, which includes several history books, is available at http://about.jstor.org/open-access?cid=eml_jb_OA_10_2016_ACRL

New book of interest:

Eric T. Meyer and Ralph Schroeder,  Knowledge Machines Digital Transformations of the Sciences and Humanities (MIT Press, 2016), https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/knowledge-machines

This book is not about digital history but can be of interest to historians:

Kent Anderson reflects on a session at the Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers 2016 meeting:

"[the moderator] delineated four main roles — an important word here, “role” — academics and researchers assume at different points across the various aspects of publishing. These roles are reader, author, reviewer, and editorial board member ...

... It is clearly impossible to satisfy every constituent role and expectation — a true no-win situation."

The New Librarianship Field Guide (MIT, 2016) -- "In concise chapters, Lankes addresses the mission of libraries and explains what constitutes a library. He offers practical advice for librarian training; provides teaching notes for each chapter; and answers “Frequently Argued Questions” about the new librarianship."

Boook of interest:

Elena Pierazzo, Digital Scholarly Editing. Theories, Models and Methods. Routledge, 2015.

Book of interest, freely available for download:

Roberto Simanowski, ed. Digital Humanities and Digital Media: Conversations on Politics, Culture, Aesthetics and Literacy (Open Humanities Press, 2016). http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/digital-humanities-and-digital-media/

From the book presentation:

In Inside Higher Ed (July 26, 2016) Barbara Fister reviews David Lewis's Reimagining the Academic Library (Rowman and Littlefield, 2016).

David Lewis also presented his ideas in an ACRL webinar.

Second issue of the newsletter Oh, the Humanities.  A publication of ACLS Humanities E-Book (HEB) and its parent organization, The American Council of Learned Societies.  Read it here.

New book of interest:

Thomas Cauvin, Public History: A Textbook of Practice (Routledge, 2016)

Gabriele Griffin and Matt Hayler, eds. Research Methods for Reading Digital Data in the Digital Humanities  (Edinburgh University Press, 2016)

Digital monograph of interest:

Nicholas Bauch, Enchanting the Desert: A Pattern Language for the Production of Space (Stanford University Press, 2016)

From the work's introduction:

A new publication in the Charleston Insights in Library, Archival, and Information Sciences series published by Purdue University Press:

Jeff Sharpe, of the Internet Archive's Midwest Regional Digitization Center, writes about the history of books they digitize:

29 February 2016 Rick Anderson posted "A Possible Game-Changer for Open Educational Resources?' on the Scholarly Kitchen.  The post begins: "Earlier this month, an EdWeek Market Brief reported that Amazon is preparing to beta-test a platform for open educational resources (OER) — textbooks and other classroom instructional materials that are provided online at no charge to users.

Frederick W. Gibbs discusses the implications of data analysis and visualizations in The American Historian (no 7, February 2016):

Article of interest:

Michael S. Seadle , (2016) "Managing and Mining Historical Research Data", Library Hi Tech, Vol. 34 Iss: 1

Purpose

To review how historical research data is managed and mined today.

Design/methodology/approach

The methodology builds on observations over the last decade.

Findings

Posted again to appear in The H-Net Book Channel. A quick scan of the Web discovered the following; perhaps they complement the excellent Art of the Review podcasts http://networks.h-net.org/node/84048/pages/88574/the-art-of-the-review .  If you have others to offer, please send them along.

How to Write a History Book Review – University of Iowa

Readers of historical fiction may find a list  published on the journal Booklist’s (American Library Association) Website useful.  See also Goodreads’ Historical Fiction 2015.

See also the Wikipedia entry National Book Critics Circle Award.