Continuing the Conversation at SSP

With the IIPC panel still fresh in our minds, we’re looking forward to another opportunity to share our work, this time with a group a little less focused, perhaps, on digital preservation, but widely experienced in typical and emerging workflows for publishing. We learned last week that a proposed panel, organized by CLOCKSS’s Craig van Dyck and including Jeremy Morse from Michigan Publishing’s Fulcrum project and myself from Stanford University Press’s digital publishing initiative, has been accepted at the next Society for Scholarly Publishing conference. The meeting will be held May 29-31, 2019 in San Diego.

Our panel, entitled “Interactive Scholarly Works and Enhanced E-books: Challenges and Emerging Solutions” continues on themes discussed at the September workshop hosted by the Michigan team in Ann Arbor, specifically the possibilities offered by existing publishing-centered preservation services to extend access to new, more fragile publication formats. The impetus, as described in the proposal, is essentially that “[s]cholars are stretching the boundaries of ‘e-books’ to create more dynamic, interactive, and media-rich works to express their research. Especially in the humanities, these ‘interactive scholarly works’ deliver a rich experience to users, while presenting certain challenges for publishers.”

The session will include presentations from each of the three panel members. More specifically, “Stanford University Press and Michigan Publishing will demonstrate a few examples of this kind of digital scholarship, while describing their experiences, including new workflows, new systems, and new challenges, especially how to preserve such dynamic content. The CLOCKSS Archive will speak to the broader context, discussing preservation challenges, including options such as web archiving and emulation.”

We’re looking forward to sharing our continued pursuits in the area of sustainable digital publishing and preservation and also to learning what our colleagues are up to. I plan to follow the “Tools and Technology” track pretty closely and will share all the details about the program as soon as they’re available.