ATG Hot Topic of the Week: Publisher-Library Partnerships and Enhanced E-books
Sylvia Miller, Project Director, “The Long Civil Rights Movement, thinks that a “kind of publisher-library partnership might take place at the level of the individual book” resulting in an “enhanced ebook.” where “archiving, digitizing, and publishing happen in tandem.” She gives the following example, “when an author has conducted oral-history interviews and consulted archival documents during research for a book, the interviews might be ingested into an archive and made available digitally, and the archival collections that were consulted might be digitized, at a library. Simultaneously, the book would be edited and produced at the publishing house. This parallel process would make it possible to publish the book as an enhanced e-book with archival material imbedded in it and outbound links to primary-source collections included as well.” Sylvia believes that there is “an exciting future for enhanced e-books in scholarly publishing in the humanities and social sciences,” and looks forward to when “publishers and librarians share best practices and work out a repeatable, scalable process.” What do you think? Is Sylvia on to something? Or is this an idea that sounds good but might be too impractical to catch on?
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