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One of the biggest challenges for The Digital Press at the University of North Dakota is developing (or more properly discovering) the digital infrastructure necessary to support robust and persistent digital context to complement the traditional books. As long as books are just volumes distributed via Amazon in paper or made available as PDFs, a relatively simple system works.
The challenges get bigger when it comes to coordinating media that exists as both a book – either in paper or in some simple digital form. As a mid-sized institutions going through some pretty significant budget cuts, we don’t have the resources to support an in-house repository (yet!), as a result, I need to use services and resources already available on the open web. Sorting this all out will be particularly significant in the next few weeks as two nearly completed projects require supplemental material.
My instinct is to use the Internet Archive to support my relatively modest needs. For example, I am almost ready to announce that I will be publishing Corinth Excavations’ Archaeological Manual. This will be the first major, published excavation manual from a project in the Mediterranean published in the last 40 years (probably since the last edition of Dever and Lance’s A Manual of Field Excavation in the early 1980s). The book will include a digital supplement which includes the forms the the Archaeological Manual recommends using in the field. These will be reproduced in the slim book (around 170 pages), but at a size appropriate for the rather narrow (8.5 x 5.5) volume. In the supplemental material, we will make them available at full size to download. Since the entire volume will be CC 4.0-By, the plan is to put the supplemental material up in the Internet Archive for download with the idea that the Internet Archive can produce a persistent URL. But I obviously want to make sure that this will all work how I think it will work so when I include the link in the paper and digital volume, it will work for years to come.
Oh, and I started working on the cover. Corinth is a pretty conservative place and the Archaeological Manual is a pretty technical, specialist book, so I wanted to convey something of the conservative, technical nature of the work. I really like Gil Sans for the title, and think that anything bolder would look overwhelming. I used Times New Roman for the author’s names. There are a lot of authors on this manual so that was tricky.
A similar issue faces my work with Micah Bloom’s Codex project. The book (about books… check out the link) also includes a video. The original plan was to archive the video in our newly minted institutional repository, but my instinct is that we won’t have this up and running by the time that the book needs to be produced in early May. So, like the supplemental material for the Corinth Archaeological Manual, I need a place to post the video that will provide a persistent link so that we can embed connect the book and the video. I’m hoping the Internet Archive can provide this.
With the SAAs beginning this week, I decided to create a little landing page for folks who are checking out The Digital Press for the first time. Just for fun, I’m embedding live views of the books from the Internet Archive. It’s not an ideal layout, but fun and dynamic way to show off The Digital Press’s archaeology catalogue. Here’s a preview.
Finally, yesterday I mentioned that my graduate historiography class is working on a project relating to the humanities, history, and the UND budget crisis. Just for fun, I designed a book cover or a poster for the project. If figure it might help promote their work when we release it for local and then public comment.
It’s nothing that’ll win a design award, but I like it:
As you can probably guess, this post is partly a cry for help, but also a little update on recent projects. If you can help, please do! If you’re curious about getting an advanced copy of forthcoming publications, do drop me a line! If you just want to insult my design skills, do that as well!
