Building a Publishing Platform Crosswalk: A Documentation Month Case Study

Abstract

One of the challenges library publishers face is, with so many new academy-owned publishing platforms available, which one is right for their services or their author needs? We identified several common publishing/digital scholarship platforms — Fulcrum, Manifold, Scalar, OJS, Janeway, and a few others — and researched basic documentation on each of them across a specific set of user-needs criteria. Criteria included publication and content types, what’s possible to ingest or embed, hosting services, preservation and export options, and a few others. We also identified, when possible, what makes one platform stand out from another when they fell into similar publishing realms (i.e., books vs. journals vs. collections). Our presentation covers which platforms we chose, what documentation we looked for for each and why, and how we decided to design the final crosswalk. It also highlights how much we were able to accomplish with one hour a week during LPC’s documentation month.